Community-Grouping Based Particle Swarm optimisation Algorithm for Feature Selection

As a frequently-used dimensionality reduction technique in machine learning, feature selection has attracted interests in the last decade. Since feature selection is essentially a combinatorial optimization problem, how to search the valuable feature subset is a challenging optimization task. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and its variations have shown their competitiveness in solving feature selection problem. However, they have been proven to be easily trapped into the local optimal in high-dimensional space due to their intrinsic characteristic of quick convergence. To this end, an effective binary particle swarm optimization algorithm, named CBPSOFS, is proposed for feature selection, where a community-grouping based adaptive updating strategy is designed to avoid trapping into the local optimum and enhance the performance of PSO algorithm in feature selection. To be specific, the correlationship among features is used to construct the feature network, where multiple feature groups are obtained by dividing the achieved feature network. Considering that a community usually contains multiple similar features, the proposed adaptive updating strategy utilizes these feature groups to make the similar features not be included in the same particle so as to maintain the diversity of the population in the evolution. In addition, an information gain based initialization strategy and a history information based resetting strategy are also developed to improve the quality of obtained feature subset. Experimental results on several real world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of CBPSOFS in feature selection when compared with the several state-of-the-art baselines.