Finding a needle in a haystack: insights on feature selection for classification tasks

Abstract The growth of Big Data has resulted in an overwhelming increase in the volume of data available, including the number of features. Feature selection, the process of selecting relevant features and discarding irrelevant ones, has been successfully used to reduce the dimensionality of datasets. However, with numerous feature selection approaches in the literature, determining the best strategy for a specific problem is not straightforward. In this study, we compare the performance of various feature selection approaches to a random selection to identify the most effective strategy for a given type of problem. We use a large number of datasets to cover a broad range of real-world challenges. We evaluate the performance of seven popular feature selection approaches and five classifiers. Our findings show that feature selection is a valuable tool in machine learning and that correlation-based feature selection is the most effective strategy regardless of the scenario. Additionally, we found that using improper thresholds with ranker approaches produces results as poor as randomly selecting a subset of features.