Finding rough set reducts with fish swarm algorithm

Rough set theory is one of the effective methods to feature selection which can preserve the characteristics of the original features by deleting redundant information. The main idea of rough set approach to feature selection is to find a globally minimal reduct, the smallest set of features keeping important information of the original set of features. Rough set theory has been used as a dataset preprocessor with much success, but current approaches to feature selection are inadequate for finding a globally minimal reduct. In this paper, we propose a novel rough set based method to feature selection using fish swarm algorithm. The fish swarm algorithm is a new intelligent swarm modeling approach that consists primarily of searching, swarming, and following behaviors. It is attractive for feature selection since fish swarms can discover the best combination of features as they swim within the subset space. In our proposed algorithm, a minimal subset can be located and verified. To show the efficiency of our algorithm, we carry out numerical experiments based on some standard UCI datasets. The results demonstrate that our algorithm can provide an efficient tool for finding a minimal subset of the features without information loss.