A novel hybrid ACO-GA algorithm for text feature selection

Abstract

In our previous work we have proposed an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for feature selection. In this paper, we hybridize the algorithm with a genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain excellent features of two algorithms by synthesizing them. Proposed algorithm is applied to a challenging feature selection problem. This is a data mining problem involving the categorization of text documents. We report the extensive comparison between our proposed algorithm and three existing algorithms - ACO-based, information gain (IG) and CHI algorithms proposed in the literature. Proposed algorithm is easily implemented and because of use of a simple classifier in that, its computational complexity is very low. Experimentations are carried out on Reuters-21578 dataset. Simulation results on Reuters-21578 dataset show the superiority of the proposed algorithm.