Enhanced Mining of High Dimensional Data Using Clustering Based Feature Subset Selection Algorithm

Feature subset selection can be viewed as the process of identifying and removing as many irrelevant and redundant features as possible. This is because irrelevant features do not contribute to the predictive accuracy and redundant features do not redound to getting a better predictor for that they provide mostly information which is already present in other feature(s). The many feature subset selection algorithms, some can effectively eliminate irrelevant features but fail to handle redundant features yet some of others can eliminate the irrelevant while taking care of the redundant features. Our proposed FAST algorithm falls into the second group. Traditionally, feature subset selection research has focused on searching for relevant features. A well-known example is Relief which weighs each feature according to its ability to discriminate instances under different targets based on distance-based criteria function. However, Relief is ineffective at removing redundant features as two predictive but highly correlated features are likely both to be highly weighted. Relief-F extends Relief, enabling this method to work with noisy and incomplete data sets and to deal with multiclass problems, but still cannot identify redundant features.