Feature Selection using Genetic Programming

Abstract

Extracting useful and novel information from the large amount of collected data has become a necessity for corporations wishing to maintain a competitive advantage. One of the biggest issues in handling these significantly large datasets is the curse of dimensionality. As the dimension of the data increases, the performance of the data mining algorithms employed to mine the data deteriorates. This deterioration is mainly caused by the large search space created as a result of having irrelevant, noisy and redundant features in the data. Feature selection is one of the various techniques that can be used to remove these unnecessary features. Feature selection consequently reduces the dimension of the data as well as the search space which in turn increases the efficiency and the accuracy of the mining algorithms. In this paper, we investigate the ability of Genetic Programming (GP), an evolutionary algorithm searching strategy capable of automatically finding solutions in complex and large search spaces, to perform feature selection. We implement a basic GP algorithm and perform feature selection on 5 benchmark classification datasets from UCI repository. To test the competitiveness and feasibility of the GP approach, we examine the classification performance of four classifiers namely J48, Naives Bayes, PART, and Random Forests using the GP selected features, all the original features and the features selected by the other commonly used feature selection techniques i.e. principal component analysis, information gain, relief-f and cfs. The experimental results show that not only does GP select a smaller set of features from the original features, classifiers using GP selected features achieve a better classification performance than using all the original features. Furthermore, compared to the other well-known feature selection techniques, GP achieves very competitive results.