A Novel Feature Selection Strategy Based on the Harris Hawks Optimization Algorithm for the Diagnosis of Cervical Cancer

Abstract

Cervical cancer is the fourth most commonly diagnosed cancer and one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths among females worldwide. Early diagnosis can greatly increase the cure rate for cervical cancer. However, due to the need for substantial medical resources, it is difficult to implement in some areas. With the development of machine learning, utilizing machine learning to automatically diagnose cervical cancer has currently become one of the main research directions in the field. Such an approach typically involves a large number of features. However, a portion of these features is redundant or irrelevant. The task of eliminating redundant or irrelevant features from the entire feature set is known as feature selection (FS). Feature selection methods can roughly be divided into three types, including filter-based methods, wrapper-based methods, and embedded-based methods. Among them, wrapper-based methods are currently the most commonly used approach, and many researchers have demonstrated that these methods can reduce the number of features while improving the accuracy of diagnosis. However, this method still has some issues. Wrapper-based methods typically use heuristic algorithms for FS, which can result in significant computational time. On the other hand, heuristic algorithms are often sensitive to parameters, leading to instability in performance. To overcome this challenge, a novel wrapper-based method named the Binary Harris Hawks Optimization (BHHO) algorithm is proposed in this paper. Compared to other wrapper-based methods, the BHHO has fewer hyper-parameters, which contributes to better stability. Furthermore, we have introduced a rank-based selection mechanism into the algorithm, which endows BHHO with enhanced optimization capabilities and greater generalizability. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed BHHO, we conducted a series of experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed BHHO demonstrates better accuracy and stability compared to other common wrapper-based FS methods on the cervical cancer dataset. Additionally, even on other disease datasets, the proposed algorithm still provides competitive results, proving its generalizability.