Semi Supervised Relevance Learning for Feature Selection on High Dimensional Data

Nowadays, the advanced technologies make amounts of data growing in a fast paced way. In many application fields, this trend concerns specially dimensions of the data. It is the case where features are about thousands and tens of thousands, while the number of instances is much smaller. This phenomenon is known as the curse of dimensionality and it results in modest classification performance and feature selection instability. In order to deal with this issue, we propose a new feature selection approach that makes use of background knowledge about some dimensions known to be more relevant, as a means of directing the feature selection process. In this approach, prior knowledge about some features is used to learn new relevant features by a semi supervised approach. Experiments on three high dimensional data sets show promising results on both classification performance and stability of feature selection.