Inversed Control Parameter in Whale Optimization Algorithm and Grey Wolf Optimizer for Wrapper-based Feature Selection: A comparative study

Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) are well-perform metaheuristic algorithms used by various researchers in solving feature selection problems. Yet, the slow convergence speed issue in Whale Optimization Algorithm and Grey Wolf Optimizer could demote the performance of feature selection and classification accuracy. Therefore, to overcome this issue, a modified WOA (mWOA) and modified GWO (mGWO) for wrapper-based feature selection were proposed in this study. The proposed mWOA and mGWO were given a new inversed control parameter which was expected to enable more search area for the search agents in the early phase of the algorithms and resulted in a faster convergence speed. The objective of this comparative study is to investigate and compare the effectiveness of the inversed control parameter in the proposed methods against the original algorithms in terms of the number of selected features and the classification accuracy. The proposed methods were implemented in MATLAB where 12 datasets with different dimensionality from the UCI repository were used. kNN was chosen as the classifier to evaluate the classification accuracy of the selected features. Based on the experimental results, mGWO did not show significant improvements in feature reduction and maintained similar accuracy as the original GWO. On the contrary, mWOA outperformed the original WOA in terms of the two criteria mentioned even on high-dimensional datasets. Evaluating the execution time of the proposed methods, utilizing different classifiers, and hybridizing proposed methods with other metaheuristic algorithms to solve feature selection problems would be future works worth exploring.