Supervised hybrid feature selection based on PSO and rough sets for medical diagnosis

Medical datasets are often classified by a large number of disease measurements and a relatively small number of patient records. All these measurements (features) are not important or irrelevant/noisy. These features may be especially harmful in the case of relatively small training sets, where this irrelevancy and redundancy is harder to evaluate. On the other hand, this extreme number of features carries the problem of memory usage in order to represent the dataset. Feature Selection (FS) is a solution that involves finding a subset of prominent features to improve predictive accuracy and to remove the redundant features. Thus, the learning model receives a concise structure without forfeiting the predictive accuracy built by using only the selected prominent features. Therefore, nowadays, FS is an essential part of knowledge discovery. In this study, new supervised feature selection methods based on hybridization of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), PSO based Relative Reduct (PSO-RR) and PSO based Quick Reduct (PSO-QR) are presented for the diseases diagnosis. The experimental result on several standard medical datasets proves the efficiency of the proposed technique as well as enhancements over the existing feature selection techniques. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.