Sine cosine optimization algorithm for feature selection

Abstract

Nowadays, a dataset includes a huge number of features with irrelevant and redundant ones. Feature selection is required for a better machine-learning algorithms' performance. A system for feature selection is proposed in this work using a sine cosine algorithm (SCA). SCA is a new stochastic search algorithm for optimization problems. SCA optimization adaptively balances the exploration and exploitation to find the optimal solution quickly. The SCA can quickly explore the feature space for optimal or near-optimal feature subset minimizing a given fitness function. The proposed fitness function used incorporates both classification accuracy and feature size reduction. The proposed system was tested on 18 datasets and shows an advance over other search methods as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) optimizers commonly used in this context using different evaluation indicators.