Efficient feature selection using one-pass generalized classifier neural network and binary bat algorithm with a novel fitness function

In high-dimensional data, many of the features are either irrelevant to the machine learning task or are redundant. These situations lead to two problems, firstly overfitting and secondly high computational overhead. The paper proposes a feature selection method to identify the relevant subset of features for the machine-learning task using wrapper approach. The wrapper approach uses the Binary Bat algorithm to select the set of features and One-pass Generalized Classifier Neural Network (OGCNN) to evaluate the selected set of features using a novel fitness function. The proposed fitness function accounts for the entropy of sensitivity and specificity along with accuracy of classifier and fraction of selected features. The fitness function is compared using four classifiers (Radial Basis Function Neural Network, Probabilistic Neural Network, Extreme Learning Machine and OGCNN) on six publicly available datasets. One-pass classifiers are chosen as these are computationally faster. The results suggest that OGCNN along with the novel fitness function performs well in the majority of cases.