ModifiedFAST: A New Optimal Feature Subset Selection Algorithm

Abstract

Feature subset selection is as a pre-processing step in learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, ModifiedFAST, for feature subset selection. This algorithm is suitable for text datasets, and uses the concept of information gain to remove irrelevant and redundant features. A new optimal value of the threshold for symmetric uncertainty, used to identify relevant features, is found. The thresholds used by previous feature selection algorithms such as FAST, Relief, and CFS were not optimal. It has been proven that the threshold value greatly affects the percentage of selected features and the classification accuracy. A new performance unified metric that combines accuracy and the number of features selected has been proposed and applied in the proposed algorithm. It was experimentally shown that the percentage of selected features obtained by the proposed algorithm was lower than that obtained using existing algorithms in most of the datasets. The effectiveness of our algorithm on th optimal threshold was statistically validated with other algorithms.