Benefiting feature selection by the discovery of false irrelevant attributes

Abstract

The ordinary feature selection methods select only the explicit relevant attributes by filtering the irrelevant ones. They trade the selection accuracy for the execution time and complexity. In which, the hidden supportive information possessed by the irrelevant attributes may be lost, so that they may miss some good combinations. We believe that attributes are useless regarding the classification task by themselves, sometimes may provide potentially useful supportive information to other attributes and thus benefit the classification task. Such a strategy can minimize the information lost, therefore is able to maximize the classification accuracy. Especially for the dataset contains hidden interactions among attributes. This paper proposes a feature selection methodology from a new angle that selects not only the relevant features, but also targeting at the potentially useful false irrelevant attributes by measuring their supportive importance to other attributes. The empirical results validate the hypothesis by demonstrating that the proposed approach outperforms most of the state-of-the-art filter based feature selection methods.