Feature selection based on rough sets and particle swarm optimization

We propose a new feature selection strategy based on rough sets and particle swarm optimization (PSO). Rough sets have been used as a feature selection method with much success, but current hill-climbing rough set approaches to feature selection are inadequate at finding optimal reductions as no perfect heuristic can guarantee optimality. On the other hand, complete searches are not feasible for even medium-sized datasets. So, stochastic approaches provide a promising feature selection mechanism. Like Genetic Algorithms, PSO is a new evolutionary computation technique, in which each potential solution is seen as a particle with a certain velocity flying through the problem space. The Particle Swarms find optimal regions of the complex search space through the interaction of individuals in the population. PSO is attractive for feature selection in that particle swarms will discover best feature combinations as they fly within the subset space. Compared with GAs, PSO does not need complex operators such as crossover and mutation, it requires only primitive and simple mathematical operators, and is computationally inexpensive in terms of both memory and runtime. Experimentation is carried out, using UCI data, which compares the proposed algorithm with a GA-based approach and other deterministic rough set reduction algorithms. The results show that PSO is efficient for rough set-based feature selection. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.