A Group Incremental Approach to Feature Selection Applying Rough Set Technique

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering 2014-02, Vol.26 (2), p.294-308
• Main Authors: Jiye Liang, Feng Wang, Chuangyin Dang, Yuhua Qian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Approximation algorithms; Dynamic data sets; Entropy; feature selection; Heuristic algorithms; incremental algorithm; Information entropy; Measurement uncertainty; rough set theory; Set theory; Uncertainty
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2012.146

Many real data increase dynamically in size. This phenomenon occurs in several fields including economics, population studies, and medical research. As an effective and efficient mechanism to deal with such data, incremental technique has been proposed in the literature and attracted much attention, which stimulates the result in this paper. When a group of objects are added to a decision table, we first introduce incremental mechanisms for three representative information entropies and then develop a group incremental rough feature selection algorithm based on information entropy. When multiple objects are added to a decision table, the algorithm aims to find the new feature subset in a much shorter time. Experiments have been carried out on eight UCI data sets and the experimental results show that the algorithm is effective and efficient.