Utilizing Bee Foraging Behavior in Mutational Salp Swarm for Feature Selection: A Study on Return Intentions of Overseas Chinese after COVID-19

Abstract We present a Bee Foraging Behavior Driven Mutational Salp Swarm Algorithm (BMSSA) based on an improved bee foraging strategy and an unscented mutation strategy. The improved bee foraging strategy is leveraged in the follower location update phase to break the fixed range search of SSA, while the unscented mutation strategy on the optimal solution is employed to enhance the quality of the optimal solution. Extensive experimental results on public CEC 2014 benchmark functions validate that the proposed BMSSA performs better than nine well-known metaheuristic methods and seven state-of-the-art algorithms. The Binary BMSSA algorithm is further proposed for feature selection by using BMSSA as the selection strategy and support vector machine as the classifier. Experimental comparisons on twelve UCI datasets demonstrate the superiority of binary BMSSA. Finally, we collected a dataset on the return-intentions of overseas Chinese after COVID-19 through an anonymous online questionnaire and performed a case study by setting up a binary BMSSA-based feature selection optimization model. . The case study shows that the development prospects, the family and job in the place of residence, seeking opportunities in China, and the possible time to return to China are critical factors influencing the willingness to return to China after COVID-19.