Revisiting Winnow: A modified online feature selection algorithm for efficient binary classification

Abstract

Winnow is an efficient binary classification algorithm that effectively learns from data even in the presence of a large number of irrelevant attributes. It is specifically designed for online learning scenarios. Unlike the Perceptron algorithm, Winnow employs a multiplicative weight update function, which leads to fewer mistakes and faster convergence. However, the original Winnow algorithm has several limitations. They include, it only works on binary data, and the weight updates are constant and do not depend on the input features. In this article, we propose a modified version of the Winnow algorithm that addresses these limitations. The proposed algorithm is capable of handling real‐valued data, updates the learning function based on the input feature vector. To evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm, we compare it with seven existing variants of the Winnow algorithm on datasets of varying sizes. We employ various evaluation metrics and parameters to assess and compare the performance of the algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms all the other algorithms used for comparison, highlighting its effectiveness in classification tasks.