Impact of Recursive Feature Elimination with Cross-validation in Modeling the Spatial Distribution of Three Mosquito Species in Morocco

Abstract

Many studies in ecology are interested in characterizing the ecological factors; determining the distribution of animal species. The classical approach consists in identifying the combination of ecological factors that allow reproducing observations of the presence and absence of the species of interest. The major difficulty lies in the imbalance between a considerable quantity of ecological factors to be tested and a relatively limited number of presence/absence observations. Selection of the most influential ecological features is a classical data pre-processing strategy that aims to overcome this imbalance and improve model performance. In this paper, we applied recursive feature elimination with cross-validation (RFECV) approach on presence/absence mosquito data in Morocco; to select optimal subsets of ecological features, in order to improve the performance of the predictive models. This method demonstrated the best ability to improve the performance of the predictive models, and can be recommended as a modeling improvement technique for large datasets.