Feature Selection Using the Domain Relationship with Genetic Algorithms

摘要

Considering the importance of the domain relationship in eliminating noisy features in feature selection, we present an alternate approach to designing a multi-objective fitness function using multiple correlation for the genetic algorithm (GA), which is used as a search tool in the problem. Multiple correlation is a simple statistical technique that uses the multiple correlation coefficients to measure the relationship between a dependent variable and a set of independent variables within the domain space. Simulation studies were conducted on both real-world and controlled data sets to assess the performance of the proposed fitness function. The comparison between the traditional fitness function and our proposed function is also reported. The results show that the proposed fitness function can perform more satisfactorily than the traditional one in all cases considered, including different data types, multi-class and multi-dimensional data.