Factor Importance Ranking and Selection Using Total Indices

Abstract

Factor importance measures the impact of each feature on output prediction accuracy. In this article, we focus on the intrinsic importance proposed by Williamson et al., which defines the importance of a factor as the reduction in predictive potential when that factor is removed. To bypass the modeling step required by the existing estimator, we present the equivalence between predictiveness potential and total Sobol’ indices from global sensitivity analysis, and introduce a novel model-free consistent estimator that can be directly computed from noisy data. Integrating with forward selection and backward elimination gives rise to FIRST, Factor Importance Ranking and Selection using Total (Sobol’) indices. Extensive simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of FIRST on regression and binary classification problems, and a clear advantage over the state-of-the-art methods.