A New Framework for Distributed Multivariate Feature Selection

Feature selection is considered as an important issue in classification domain. Selecting a good feature through maximum relevance criterion to class label and minimum redundancy among features affect improving the classification accuracy. However, most current feature selection algorithms just work with the centralized methods. In this paper, we suggest a distributed version of the mRMR feature selection approach. In mRMR, feature selection is performed based on maximum relevance to class and minimum redundancy among the features. The suggested method include six stages: in the first stage, after determining training and test data, training data are distributed horizontally. All subsets have same number of features. In the second stage, each subset of features is scored using mRMR feature selection. Features with higher ranks are selected and others are eliminated. In the fourth stage, features which were omitted are voted. In the fifth stage, the selected features are merged to determine the final set. In the final stage, classification accuracy is evaluated using final training data and test data. Our method quality has been evaluated by six datasets. The results prove that the suggested method can improve classification accuracy compared to methods just based on maximum relevance to class label in addition to runtime reduction.