Measuring the stability of feature selection with applications to ensemble methods

Abstract

Ensemble methods are often used to decide on a good selection of features for later processing by a classifier. Examples of this are in the determination of Random Forest variable importance proposed by Breiman, and in the concept of feature selection ensembles, where the outputs of multiple feature selectors are combined to yield more robust results. All of these methods rely critically on the concept of feature selection stability - similar but distinct to the concept of diversity in classifier ensembles. We conduct a systematic study of the literature, identifying desirable/undesirable properties, and identify a weakness in existing measures. A simple correction is proposed, and empirical studies are conducted to illustrate its utility.