Binary butterfly optimization approaches for feature selection

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2019-02, Vol.116, p.147-160
• Main Authors: Arora, Sankalap, Anand, Priyanka
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Binary butterfly optimization algorithm; Bio-inspired optimization; Butterfly optimization algorithm; Classification; Data mining; Datasets; Feature extraction; Feature selection; Fitness; Optimization; Pattern recognition; Search algorithms; State of the art
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2018.08.051

•Two binary variants of the butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA) are proposed.•Two transfer functions are used to map the continuous search space to discrete one.•Twenty one UCI datasets are utilized in the experiments.•A superior performance of the proposed binary variants is proved in the experiments. In this paper, binary variants of the Butterfly Optimization Algorithm (BOA) are proposed and used to select the optimal feature subset for classification purposes in a wrapper-mode. BOA is a recently proposed algorithm that has not been systematically applied to feature selection problems yet. BOA can efficiently explore the feature space for optimal or near-optimal feature subset minimizing a given fitness function. The two proposed binary variants of BOA are applied to select the optimal feature combination that maximizes classification accuracy while minimizing the number of selected features. In these variants, the native BOA is utilized while its continuous steps are bounded in a threshold using a suitable threshold function after squashing them. The proposed binary algorithms are compared with five state-of-the-art approaches and four latest high performing optimization algorithms. A number of assessment indicators are utilized to properly assess and compare the performance of these algorithms over 21 datasets from the UCI repository. The experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed approaches in improving the classification accuracy compared to other wrapper-based algorithms, which proves the ability of BOA algorithm in searching the feature space and selecting the most informative attributes for classification tasks.