Abstract
•Developing a new paradigm for the feature selection problem based on the hyperheuristic methodology.•Configuring the combination of the components in to automatically find the most pertinent features for each dataset.•Evaluating the performance of the proposed technique using a comprehensive set of eighteen datasets.•Comparing the results of the best FS combination with the other well-known FS methods.
Feature selection (FS) is a crucial step for effective data mining since it has largest effect on improving the performance of classifiers. This is achieved by removing the irrelevant features and using only the relevant features. Many metaheuristic approaches exist in the literature in attempt to address this problem. The performance of these approaches differ based on the settings of a number of factors including the use of chaotic maps, opposition-based learning (OBL) and the percentage of the population that OBL will be applied to, the metaheuristic (MH) algorithm adopted, the classifier utilized, and the threshold value used to convert real solutions to binary ones. However, it is not an easy task to identify the best settings for these different components in order to determine the relevant features for a specific dataset. Moreover, running extensive experiments to fine tune these settings for each and every dataset will consume considerable time. In order to mitigate this important issue, a hyper-heuristic based FS paradigm is proposed. In the proposed model, a two-stage approach is adopted to identify the best combination of these components. In the first stage, referred to as the training stage, the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is used as a controller for selecting the best combination of components to be used by the second stage. In the second stage, referred to as the testing stage, the received combination will be evaluated using a testing set. Empirical evaluation of the proposed framework is based on numerous experiments performed on the most popular 18 datasets from the UCI machine learning repository. Experimental results illustrates that the generated generic configuration provides a better performance than eight other metaheuristic algorithms over all performance measures when applied to the UCI dataset. Moreover, The overall paradigm ranks at number one when compared against state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, the generic configuration provides a very competitive performance for high dimensional datasets.