A feature selection technique for classificatory analysis

Patterns summarizing mutual associations between class decisions and attribute values in a pre-classified database, provide insight into the significance of attributes and also useful classificatory knowledge. In this paper we have proposed a conditional probability based, efficient method to extract the significant attributes from a database. Reducing the feature set during pre-processing enhances the quality of knowledge extracted and also increases the speed of computation. Our method supports easy visualization of classificatory knowledge. A likelihood-based classification algorithm that uses this classificatory knowledge is also proposed. We have also shown how the classification methodology can be used for cost-sensitive learning where both accuracy and precision of prediction are important. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.