Augmented electric eel foraging optimization algorithm for feature selection with high-dimensional biological and medical diagnosis

This paper explores the importance of the electric eel foraging optimization (EEFO) algorithm in addressing feature selection (FS) problems, with the aim of ameliorating the practical benefit of FS in real-world applications. The use of EEFO to solve FS problems props our goal of providing clean and useful datasets that provide robust effectiveness for use in classification and clustering tasks. High-dimensional feature selection problems (HFSPs) are more common nowadays yet intricate where they contain a large number of features. Hence, the vast number of features in them should be carefully selected in order to determine the optimal subset of features. As the basic EEFO algorithm experiences premature convergence, there is a need to enhance its global and local search capabilities when applied in the field of FS. In order to tackle such issues, a binary augmented EEFO (BAEEFO) algorithm was developed and proposed for HFSPs. The following strategies were integrated into the mathematical model of the original EEFO algorithm to create BAEEFO: (1) resting behavior with nonlinear coefficient; (2) weight coefficient and confidence effect in the hunting process; (3) spiral search strategy; and (4) Gaussian mutation and random perturbations when the algorithm update is stagnant. Experimental findings confirm the effectiveness of the proposed BAEEFO method on 23 HFSPs gathered from the UCI repository, recording up to a 10% accuracy increment over the basic BEEFO algorithm. In most test cases, BAEEFO outperformed its competitors in classification accuracy rates and outperformed BEEFO in 90% of the datasets used. Thereby, BAEEFO has demonstrated strong competitiveness in terms of fitness scores and classification accuracy. When compared to its competitors, BAEEFO produced superior reduction rates with the fewest number of features selected. The findings in this research underscore the critical need for FS to combat the curse of dimensionality concerns and find highly useful features in data mining applications such as classification. The use of a new meta-heuristic algorithm incorporated with efficient search strategies in solving HFSPs represents a step forward in using this algorithm to solve other practical real-world problems in a variety of domains. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.