A Hybrid Feature Selection Method for Effective Data Classification in Data Mining Applications

In data mining, people require feature selection to select relevant features and to remove unimportant irrelevant features from a original data set based on some evolution criteria. Filter and wrapper are the two methods used but here the authors have proposed a hybrid feature selection method to take advantage of both methods. The proposed method uses symmetrical uncertainty and genetic algorithms for selecting the optimal feature subset. This has been done so as to improve processing time by reducing the dimension of the data set without compromising the classification accuracy. This proposed hybrid algorithm is much faster and scales well to the data set in terms of selected features, classification accuracy and running time than most existing algorithms.