MIFS-ND: A mutual information-based feature selection method

•We propose a greedy feature selection method using mutual information theory.•The method uses feature–class and feature–feature mutual information.•We use NSGA-II method to select an optimal feature subset.•The accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated using multiple classifiers.

Feature selection is used to choose a subset of relevant features for effective classification of data. In high dimensional data classification, the performance of a classifier often depends on the feature subset used for classification. In this paper, we introduce a greedy feature selection method using mutual information. This method combines both feature–feature mutual information and feature–class mutual information to find an optimal subset of features to minimize redundancy and to maximize relevance among features. The effectiveness of the selected feature subset is evaluated using multiple classifiers on multiple datasets. The performance of our method both in terms of classification accuracy and execution time performance, has been found significantly high for twelve real-life datasets of varied dimensionality and number of instances when compared with several competing feature selection techniques.