A modified kolmogorov-smirnov correlation based filter Algorithm for feature selection

Abstract

A feature selection is a technique of selecting a subset of relevant features from which the classification model can be constructed for a particular task. Feature selection is a preprocessing step of machine learning which is effective in reducing dimensionality, removing irrelevant data, increasing learning accuracy, and improving results. In this paper, a modified Kolmogorov-Smirnov Correlation Based Filter algorithm for Feature Selection is proposed based on Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic which uses class label information while comparing feature pairs. Results obtained from this algorithm are compared with two other algorithms, Correlation Feature Selection algorithm (CFS) and simple Kolmogorov Smirnov-Correlation Based Filter (KS-CBF), capable of removing irrelevancy and redundancy. The classification accuracy is achieved with the reduced feature set using the proposed approach with two of the standard classifiers such as the Decision-Tree classifier and the K-NN classifier. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg.