A Novel Feature Selection Method for High-Dimensional Biomedical Data Based on an Improved Binary Clonal Flower Pollination Algorithm

In the biomedical field, large amounts of biological and clinical data have been accumulated rapidly, which can be analyzed to emphasize the assessment of at-risk patients and improve diagnosis. However, a major challenge encountered associated with biomedical data analysis is the so-called “curse of dimensionality.” For this issue, a novel feature selection method based on an improved binary clonal flower pollination algorithm is proposed to eliminate unnecessary features and ensure a highly accurate classification of disease. The absolute balance group strategy and adaptive Gaussian mutation are adopted, which can increase the diversity of the population and improve the search performance. The KNN classifier is used to evaluate the classification accuracy. Extensive experimental results in six, publicly available, high-dimensional, biomedical datasets show that the proposed method can obtain high classification accuracy and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.