Enhanced feature clustering method based on ant colony optimization for feature selection

The popular modified graph clustering ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm (MGCACO) performs feature selection (FS) by grouping highly correlated features. However, the MGCACO has problems in local search, thus limiting the search for optimal feature subset. Hence, an enhanced feature clustering with ant colony optimization (ECACO) algorithm is proposed. The improvement constructs an ACO feature clustering method to obtain clusters of highly correlated features. The ACO feature clustering method utilizes the ability of various mechanisms, such as local and global search to provide highly correlated features. The performance of ECACO was evaluated on six benchmark datasets from the University California Irvine (UCI) repository and two deoxyribonucleic acid microarray datasets, and its performance was compared against that of five benchmark metaheuristic algorithms. The classifiers used are random forest, k-nearest neighbors, decision tree, and support vector machine. Experimental results on the UCI dataset show the superior performance of ECACO compared with other algorithms in all classifiers in terms of classification accuracy. Experiments on the microarray datasets, in general, showed that the ECACO algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of average classification accuracy. ECACO can be utilized for FS in classification tasks for high-dimensionality datasets in various application domains such as medical diagnosis, biological classification, and health care systems.