A novel multi population based particle swarm optimization for feature selection

Feature selection is an integral part of any machine learning system and the success of such systems highly depends on the relevance of features with the target domain. Feature selection can be classified as NP-Hard problem since a large number of possible solutions exists especially when the feature space is high dimensional. In addition to standard feature selection algorithms, evolutionary algorithms have also yielded promising results. In this paper, a novel multi population based particle swarm optimization (MPPSO) is proposed for feature selection. In this method, multi population start with initial solutions generated by random and Relieff based initialization and searches solution space simultaneously using both populations. 26 UCI and 3 ASU datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the method. The results show that MPPSO generally achieves better average classification accuracies than the other algorithms. Specifically, for the datasets with a large number of features, MPPSO achieves the smallest number of selected features with highest classification accuracies compared to other algorithms.