Abstract
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to improve the classification of families having children with affective-behavioral maladies, and thus giving the families a suitable orientation.
Design/methodology/approach - The proposed methodology includes three steps. Step 1 addresses initial data preprocessing, by noise filtering or data condensation. Step 2 performs a multiple feature sets selection, by using genetic algorithms and rough sets. Finally, Step 3 merges the candidate solutions and obtains the selected features and instances.
Findings - The new proposal show very good results on the family data (with 100 percent of correct classifications). It also obtained accurate results over a variety of repository data sets. The proposed approach is suitable for dealing with non-symmetric similarity functions, as well as with high-dimensionality mixed and incomplete data.
Originality/value - Previous work in the state of the art only considers instance selection to preprocess the schools for children with affective-behavioral maladies data. This paper explores using a new combined instance and feature selection technique to select relevant instances and features, leading to better classification, and to a simplification of the data.