Multi-objective feature selection with NSGA II

Abstract

This paper deals with the multi-objective definition of the feature selection problem for different pattern recognition domains. We use NSGA II the latest multi-objective algorithm developed for resolving problems of multiobjective aspects with more accuracy and a high convergence speed. We define the feature selection as a problem including two competing objectives and we try to find a set of optimal solutions so called Pareto-optimal solutions instead of a single optimal solution. The two competing objectives are the minimization of both the number of used features and the classification error using 1-NN classifier. We apply our method to five databases selected from the UCI repository and we report the results on these databases. We present the convergence of the NSGA II on different problems and discuss the behavior of NSGA II on these different contexts. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.