Feature selection approach based on whale optimization algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, a feature selection system is introduced applies the whale optimization algorithm (WOA). WOA is a recently introduced meta-heuristic optimization algorithm that mimics the natural behavior of the humpback whales. The proposed model applies the wrapper-based method to reach the optimal subset of features. This technique was applied to find the best feature subset that maximizes the accuracy of the classification while preserving the minimum number of features. The proposed model is compared with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) using a number of assessment indicators on 16 different data-sets from UCI data repository. The results demonstrate the advantage of the introduced algorithm compared to the other optimizers.