Heuristic Approach to Solve Feature Selection Problem

One of the successful methods in classification problems is feature selection. Feature selection algorithms; try to classify an instance with lower dimension, instead of huge number of required features, with higher and acceptable accuracy. In fact an instance may contain useless features which might result to misclassification. An appropriate feature selection methods tries to increase the effect of significant features while ignores insignificant subset of features. In this work feature selection is formulated as an optimization problem and a novel feature selection procedure in order to achieve to a better classification results is proposed. Experiments over a standard benchmark demonstrate that applying harmony search in the context of feature selection is a feasible approach and improves the classification results.