Projection-based measure for efficient feature selection

The attribute selection techniques for supervised learning, used in the preprocessing phase to emphasize the most relevant attributes, allow making models of classification simpler and easy to understand. Depending on the method to apply: starting point, search organization, evaluation strategy, and the stopping criterion, there is an added cost to the classification algorithm that we are going to use, that normally will be compensated, in greater or smaller extent, by the attribute reduction in the classification model. The method proposed in this work utilizes a measure based on projections to guide the selection of the attributes. The algorithm (SOAP: Selection of Attributes by Projection) has some interesting characteristics: lower computational cost (O(mn log n) m attributes and n examples in the data set) with respect to other typical algorithms due to the absence of distance and statistical calculations; its applicability to any labelled data set, that is to say, it can contain continuous and discrete variables, with no need for transformation. The performance of SOAP is analysed in two ways: percentage of reduction and classification. SOAP has been compared to CFS [4] and ReliefF [8]. The results are generated by C4.5 before and after the application of the algorithms.