Joint feature transformation and selection based on Dempster-Shafer theory

Abstract

In statistical pattern recognition, feature transformation attempts to change original feature space to a low-dimensional subspace, in which new created features are discriminative and non-redundant, thus improving the predictive power and generalization ability of subsequent classification models. Traditional transformation methods are not designed specifically for tackling data containing unreliable and noisy input features. To deal with these inputs, a new approach based on Dempster-Shafer Theory is proposed in this paper. A specific loss function is constructed to learn the transformation matrix, in which a sparsity term is included to realize joint feature selection during transformation, so as to limit the influence of unreliable input features on the output low-dimensional subspace. The proposed method has been evaluated by several synthetic and real datasets, showing good performance.