Feature selection based on neighborhood rough sets and Gini index

Abstract

Neighborhood rough set is considered an essential approach for dealing with incomplete data and inexact knowledge representation, and it has been widely applied in feature selection. The Gini index is an indicator used to evaluate the impurity of a dataset and is also commonly employed to measure the importance of features in feature selection. This article proposes a novel feature selection methodology based on these two concepts. In this methodology, we present the neighborhood Gini index and the neighborhood class Gini index and then extensively discuss their properties and relationships with attributes. Subsequently, two forward greedy feature selection algorithms are developed using these two metrics as a foundation. Finally, to comprehensively evaluate the performance of the algorithm proposed in this article, comparative experiments were conducted on 16 UCI datasets from various domains, including industry, food, medicine, and pharmacology, against four classical neighborhood rough set-based feature selection algorithms. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm improves the average classification accuracy on the 16 datasets by over 6%, with improvements exceeding 10% in five. Furthermore, statistical tests reveal no significant differences between the proposed algorithm and the four classical neighborhood rough set-based feature selection algorithms. However, the proposed algorithm demonstrates high stability, eliminating most redundant or irrelevant features effectively while enhancing classification accuracy. In summary, the algorithm proposed in this article outperforms classical neighborhood rough set-based feature selection algorithms.