Feature selection based on fuzzy joint mutual information maximization

Abstract

Nowadays, real-world applications handle a huge amount of data, especially with high-dimension features space. These datasets are a significant challenge for classification systems. Unfortunately, most of the features present are irrelevant or redundant, thus making these systems inefficient and inaccurate. For this reason, many feature selection (FS) methods based on information theory have been introduced to improve the classification performance. However, the current methods have some limitations such as dealing with continuous features, estimating the redundancy relations, and considering the outer-class information. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a new FS method, called Fuzzy Joint Mutual Information Maximization (FJMIM). The effectiveness of our proposed method is verified by conducting an experimental comparison with nine of conventional and state-of-the-art feature selection methods. Based on 13 benchmark datasets, experimental results confirm that our proposed method leads to promising improvement in classification performance and feature selection stability.