Wolf search algorithm for attribute reduction in classification

Abstract

Data sets ordinarily includes a huge number of attributes, with irrelevant and redundant attributes. Redundant and irrelevant attributes might minimize the classification accuracy because of the huge search space. The main goal of attribute reduction is choose a subset of relevant attributes from a huge number of available attributes to obtain comparable or even better classification accuracy than using all attributes. A system for feature selection is proposed in this paper using a modified version of the wolf search algorithm optimization. WSA is a bio-inspired heuristic optimization algorithm that imitates the way wolves search for food and survive by avoiding their enemies. The WSA can quickly search the feature space for optimal or near-optimal feature subset minimizing a given fitness function. The proposed fitness function used incorporate both classification accuracy and feature reduction size. The proposed system is applied on a set of the UCI machine learning data sets and proves good performance in comparison with the GA and PSO optimizers commonly used in this context.