RFCBF: enhance the performance and stability of Fast Correlation-Based Filter

Abstract

Feature selection is a preprocessing step that plays a crucial role in the domain of machine learning and data mining. Feature selection methods have been shown to be effective in removing redundant and irrelevant features, improving the learning algorithm’s prediction performance. Among the various methods of feature selection based on redundancy, the fast correlation-based filter (FCBF) is one of the most effective. In this paper, we developed a novel extension of FCBF, called resampling FCBF (RFCBF) that combines resampling technique to improve classification accuracy. We performed comprehensive experiments to compare the RFCBF with other state-of-the-art feature selection methods using three competitive classifiers (K-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, and logistic regression) on 12 publicly available datasets. The experimental results show that the RFCBF algorithm yields significantly better results than previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy and runtime.