Classification of High Dimensionality Data through Feature Selection Using Markov Blanket

A classification task requires an exponentially growing amount of computation time and number of observations as the variable dimensionality increases. Thus, reducing the dimensionality of the data is essential when the number of observations is limited. Often, dimensionality reduction or feature selection leads to better classification performance than using the whole number of features. In this paper, we study the possibility of utilizing the Markov blanket discovery algorithm as a new feature selection method. The Markov blanket of a target variable is the minimal variable set for explaining the target variable on the basis of conditional independence of all the variables to be connected in a Bayesian network. We apply several Markov blanket discovery algorithms to some high-dimensional categorical and continuous data sets, and compare their classification performance with other feature selection methods using well-known classifiers.