QBSO-FS: A Reinforcement Learning Based Bee Swarm Optimization Metaheuristic for Feature Selection

Feature selection is often used before a data mining or a machine learning task in order to build more accurate models. It is considered as a hard optimization problem and metaheuristics give very satisfactory results for such problems. In this work, we propose a hybrid metaheuristic that integrates a reinforcement learning algorithm with Bee Swarm Optimization metaheuristic (BSO) for solving feature selection problem. QBSO-FS follows the wrapper approach. It uses a hybrid version of BSO with Q-learning for generating feature subsets and a classifier to evaluate them. The goal of using Q-learning is to benefit from the advantage of reinforcement learning to make the search process more adaptive and more efficient. The performances of QBSO-FS are evaluated on 20 well-known datasets and the results are compared with those of original BSO and other recently published methods. The results show that QBO-FS outperforms BSO-FS for large instances and gives very satisfactory results compared to recently published algorithms.