A Cooperative Coevolutionary Approach to Discretization-Based Feature Selection for High-Dimensional Data

Recent discretization-based feature selection methods show great advantages by introducing the entropy-based cut-points for features to integrate discretization and feature selection into one stage for high-dimensional data. However, current methods usually consider the individual features independently, ignoring the interaction between features with cut-points and those without cut-points, which results in information loss. In this paper, we propose a cooperative coevolutionary algorithm based on the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), which searches for the feature subsets with and without entropy-based cut-points simultaneously. For the features with cut-points, a ranking mechanism is used to control the probability of mutation and crossover in GA. In addition, a binary-coded PSO is applied to update the indices of the selected features without cut-points. Experimental results on 10 real datasets verify the effectiveness of our algorithm in classification accuracy compared with several state-of-the-art competitors.