Estimation of Discriminative Feature Subset Using Community Modularity

Abstract

Feature selection (FS) is an important preprocessing step in machine learning and data mining. In this paper, a new feature subset evaluation method is proposed by constructing a sample graph (SG) in different k-features and applying community modularity to select highly informative features as a group. However, these features may not be relevant as an individual. Furthermore, relevant in-dependency rather than irrelevant redundancy among the selected features is effectively measured with the community modularity Q value of the sample graph in the k-features. An efficient FS method called k-features sample graph feature selection is presented. A key property of this approach is that the discriminative cues of a feature subset with the maximum relevant in-dependency among features can be accurately determined. This community modularity-based method is then verified with the theory of k-means cluster. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach is more effective, as verified by the results of several experiments.