Filter-Based Multi-Objective Feature Selection Using NSGA III and Cuckoo Optimisation Algorithm

Feature selection aims to confiscate inappropriate features and yet improve classification performance. These aims are conflicting with one another, and a choice must be made in the presence of the trade-off between them. Numerous researches deal with feature selection problem but, they are mostly single-objective based. Nowadays, multi-objective optimisation approaches are becoming the most suitable approaches to deal with feature selection problems. They can easily create a balance between selected features and classification accuracy or error rate. Evolutionary computation techniques have been applied for multi-objective feature selection. Cuckoo optimisation algorithm is among the most popular technique that is exceptional in solving the problems of feature selection. Based on the binary cuckoo optimisation algorithm, two different multi-objective filter-based feature selection frameworks are presented with the idea of nondominated sorting genetic algorithms NSGAIII (BCNSG3) along with NSGAII (BCNSG2). Thus, four multi-objective filter-based feature selection approaches are proposed by employing mutual information along with gain ratio based-entropy as the respective filter evaluation measures in all the proposed frameworks. The results obtained are examined and analysed against the existing methods and single objective scheme on fourteen (14) datasets of varying degree of difficulties. The outcome of the experiments displays that the proposed multi-objective algorithms successfully derive a set of nondominated solutions that used the least feature size and attained the best error rate than using full-length features. In general, BCNSG2 obtained the best results compared to the existing methods and single-objective algorithm, whereas BCNSG3 outdoes all other approaches.