A Multimodal Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm for Filter Feature Selection in Multilabel Classification

Abstract

Multilabel learning is an emergent topic that addresses the challenge of associating multiple labels with a single instance simultaneously. Multilabel datasets often exhibit high dimensionality with noisy, irrelevant, and redundant features. In recent years, multilabel feature selection (MLFS) has gained prominence as a crucial and emerging machine learning task due to its ability to handle such data effectively. However, existing approaches for MLFS often prioritize top-ranked features based on intrinsic data criteria, disregarding relationships within the feature subset. Additionally, compared with conventional feature selection, multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have not been widely explored in the context of MLFS. This study aims to address these gaps by proposing a multimodal multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MMOEA) called MMDE_SICD which incorporates a preelimination scheme, an improved initialization scheme, an exploration scheme inspired by genetic operations and a statistically inspired crowding distance scheme. The results show that the proposed MMDE_SICD algorithm can outperform a variety of MOEAs and MMOEAs as well as conventional MLFS algorithms. Notably, this study is the first of its kind to consider MLFS as a multimodal multiobjective problem.