Md. Monirul Kabir, Md. Shahjahan, and Kazuyuki Murase,

Abstract:
This paper proposes an effective algorithm for feature selection (ACOFS) that uses a global Ant Colony Optimization algorithm (ACO) search strategy. To make ACO effective in feature selection, our proposed algorithm uses an effective local search in selecting significant features. The novelty of ACOFS lies in its effective balance between ant exploration and exploitation using new pheromone update and heuristic information computation rules to generate a subset of a smaller number of significant features. We evaluate algorithm performance using seven real-world benchmark classification datasets. Results show that ACOFS generates smaller subsets of significant features with improved classification accuracy.

Keywords: feature selection, local search, ant colony optimization algorithm, neural network