Chunking and cooperation in particle swarm optimization for feature selection

Abstract

Bio-inspired optimization aims at adapting observed natural behavioral patterns and social phenomena towards efficiently solving complex optimization problems, and is nowadays gaining much attention. However, researchers recently highlighted an inconsistency between the need in the field and the actual trend. Indeed, while nowadays it is important to design innovative contributions, an actual trend in bio-inspired optimization is to re-iterate the existing knowledge in a different form. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap. More precisely, we start first by highlighting new examples for this problem by considering and describing the concepts of chunking and cooperative learning. Second, by considering particle swarm optimization (PSO), we present a novel bridge between these two notions adapted to the problem of feature selection. In the experiments, we investigate the practical importance of our approach while exploring both its strength and limitations. The results indicate that the approach is mainly suitable for large datasets, and that further research is needed to improve the computational efficiency of the approach and to ensure the independence of the sub-problems defined using chunking.