Multivariate sample similarity measure for feature selection with a resemblance model

Abstract

Feature selection improves the classification performance of machine learning models. It also identifies the important features and eliminates those with little significance. Furthermore, feature selection reduces the dimensionality of training and testing data points. This study proposes a feature selection method that uses a multivariate sample similarity measure. The method selects features with significant contributions using a machine-learning model. The multivariate sample similarity measure is evaluated using the University of California, Irvine heart disease dataset and compared with existing feature selection methods. The multivariate sample similarity measure is evaluated with metrics such as minimum subset selected, accuracy, F1-score, and area under the curve (AUC). The results show that the proposed method is able to diagnose chest pain, thallium scan, and major vessels scanned using X-rays with a high capability to distinguish between healthy and heart disease patients with a 99.6% accuracy.