Feature selection algorithm based on incremental mutual information and cockroach swarm optimization

Abstract

Feature selection is an effective preprocessing technique to reduce data dimension. For feature selection, rough set theory provides many measures, among which mutual information is one of the most important attribute measures. However, mutual information based importance measures are computationally expensive and inaccurate, especially in hypersample instances, and it is undoubtedly a NP-hard problem in high-dimensional hyperhigh-dimensional data sets. Although many representative group intelligent algorithm feature selection strategies have been proposed so far to improve the accuracy, there is still a bottleneck when using these feature selection algorithms to process high-dimensional large-scale data sets, which consumes a lot of performance and is easy to select weakly correlated and redundant features. In this study, we propose an incremental mutual information based improved swarm intelligent optimization method (IMIICSO), which uses rough set theory to calculate the importance of feature selection based on mutual information. This method extracts decision table reduction knowledge to guide group algorithm global search. By exploring the computation of mutual information of supersamples, we can not only discard the useless features to speed up the internal and external computation, but also effectively reduce the cardinality of the optimal feature subset by using IMIICSO method, so that the cardinality is minimized by comparison. The accuracy of feature subsets selected by the improved cockroach swarm algorithm based on incremental mutual information is better or almost the same as that of the original swarm intelligent optimization algorithm. Experiments using 10 datasets derived from UCI, including large scale and high dimensional datasets, confirmed the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.