On combining fractal dimension with GA for feature subset selecting

Abstract

Selecting a set of features which is optimal for a given task is a problem which plays an important role in a wide variety of contexts including pattern recognition, adaptive control, and machine learning. Recently, exploiting fractal dimension to reduce the features of dataset is a novel method. FDR (Fractal Dimensionality Reduction), proposed by Traina in 2000, is the most famous fractal dimension based feature selection algorithm. However, it is intractable in the high dimensional data space for multiple scanning the dataset and incapable of eliminating two or more features simultaneously. In this paper we combine GA with the Z-ordering based FDR for addressing this problem and present a new algorithm GAZBFDR(Genetic Algorithm and Z-ordering Based FDR). The algorithm proposed can directly select the fixed number features from the feature space and utilize the fractal dimension variation to evaluate the selected features within the comparative lower space. The experimental results show that GAZBFDR algorithm achieves better performance in the high dimensional dataset. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.