Mini-Batch Normalized Mutual Information: A Hybrid Feature Selection Method

Abstract

Feature Selection has been a significant preprocessing procedure for classification in the area of Supervised Machine Learning. It is mostly applied when the attribute set is very large. The large set of attributes often tend to misguide the classifier. Extensive research has been performed to increase the efficacy of the predictor by finding the optimal set of features. The feature subset should be such that it enhances the classification accuracy by the removal of redundant features. We propose a new feature selection mechanism, an amalgamation of the filter and the wrapper techniques by taking into consideration the benefits of both the methods. Our hybrid model is based on a two phase process where we rank the features and then choose the best subset of features based on the ranking. We validated our model with various datasets, using multiple evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we have also compared and analyzed our results with previous works. The proposed model outperformed many existent algorithms and has given us good results.