Comparison of multi-objective algorithms applied to feature selection

Abstract

The feature selection problem can be formulated as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem, as it involves the minimization of the feature subset cardinality and the misclassification error. In this chapter, a comparison of MOO algorithms applied to feature selection is presented. The used MOO methods are: Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), Archived Multi Objective Simulated Annealing (AMOSA), and Direct Multi Search (DMS). To test the feature subset solutions, Takagi- Sugeno fuzzy models are used as classifiers. To solve the feature selection problem, AMOSA was adapted to deal with discrete optimization. The multi-objective methods are applied to four benchmark datasets used in the literature and the obtained results are compared and discussed.