A hybrid algorithm using ant and bee colony optimization for feature selection and classification (AC-ABC Hybrid)

Abstract Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Bee Colony Optimization (BCO) are famous meta-heuristic search algorithms used in solving numerous combinatorial optimization problems. Feature Selection (FS) helps to speed up the process of classification by extracting the relevant and useful information from the dataset. FS is seen as an optimization problem because selecting the appropriate feature subset is very important. This paper proposes a novel Swarm based hybrid algorithm AC-ABC Hybrid, which combines the characteristics of Ant Colony and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithms to optimize feature selection. By hybridizing, we try to eliminate stagnation behavior of the ants and time consuming global search for initial solutions by the employed bees. In the proposed algorithm, Ants use exploitation by the Bees to determine the best Ant and best feature subset; Bees adapt the feature subsets generated by the Ants as their food sources. Thirteen UCI (University of California, Irvine) benchmark datasets have been used for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show the promising behavior of the proposed method in increasing the classification accuracies and optimal selection of features.