A Lightweight Feature Selection Method Based on Rankability

Abstract

Feature selection, as one of the essential dimensionality reduction techniques, hasbecome one popular yet challenging area in the field, such as data mining andmachine learning. Unlike feature extraction (such as principle component analysis andnon-negative matrix factorization), preserving the entire information but losing thefeature relevance. Data processing in feature selection will lose information, leading tothe need to develop lightweight, efficient, and practical methods that preserve the datainformation as much as possible while performing dimensional reduction. In this paper,we propose a rankability-based feature selection method. The rankability concept wasproposed in 2019, similar to the entropy concept, and has not been studied widely yet.The proposed method is lightweight in terms of complexity, which requires no iterativeoptimization or auxiliary estimator tools.We experimented with sixteen datasets and compared our results with four otheralgorithms. The results show that our rankability-based feature selection methodoutperforms the fuzzy entropy-based method on five datasets in eight, and the averageaccuracy increased by 0.1482, 0.1078, and 0.1157, respectively. Then, in the varieddimension-reducing experiments, the proposed method shows superiority on fourdatasets out of eight and is competitive with others on two datasets out of eight.

Keywords: feature selection, Dimensionality reduction, Machine learning, Rankability, Similarityscore