Multi-Objective Feature Subset Selection using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm

This paper presents an evolutionary algorithm based technique to solve multi-objective feature subset selection problem. The data used for classification contains large number of features called attributes. Some of these attributes are not relevant and needs to be eliminated. In classification procedure, each feature has an effect on the accuracy, cost and learning time of the classifier. So, there is a strong requirement to select a subset of the features before building the classifier. This proposed technique treats feature subset selection as multi-objective optimization problem. This research uses one of the latest multi-objective genetic algorithms (NSGA - II). The fitness value of a particular feature subset is measured by using ID3. The testing accuracy acquired is then assigned to the fitness value. This technique is tested on several datasets taken from the UCI machine repository. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility of using NSGA-II for feature subset selection.