Feature selection based on Bi-objective differential evolution

Feature selection is one of the most challenging problems of pattern recognition and data mining. In this paper, a feature selection algorithm based on an improved version of binary differential evolution is proposed. The method simultaneously optimizes two feature selection criteria, namely, set approximation accuracy of rough set theory and relational algebra based derived score, in order to select the most relevant feature subset from an entire feature set. Superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods is confirmed by experimental results, which is conducted over seven publicly available benchmark datasets of different characteristics such as a low number of objects with a high number of features, and a high number of objects with a low number of features.