A Hybrid Feature Selection based on Mutual Information and Genetic Algorithm

Feature selection aims to choose an optimal subset of features that are necessary and sufficient to improve the generalization performance and the running efficiency of the learning algorithm. To get the optimal subset in the feature selection process, a hybrid feature selection based on mutual information and genetic algorithm is proposed in this paper. In order to make full use of the advantages of filter and wrapper model, the algorithm is divided into two phases: the filter phase and the wrapper phase. In the filter phase, this algorithm first uses the mutual information to sort the feature, and provides the heuristic information for the subsequent genetic algorithm, to accelerate the search process of the genetic algorithm. In the wrapper phase, using the genetic algorithm as the search strategy, considering the performance of the classifier and dimension of subset as an evaluation criterion, search the best subset of features. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm has higher classification accuracy and smaller feature dimension, and its running time is less than the time of using genetic algorithm.