Combining Fuzzy C-Means Clustering with Fuzzy Rough Feature Selection

With the rapid development of the network, data fusion becomes an important research hotspot. Large amounts of data need to be preprocessed in data fusion; in practice, the features of datasets can be filtered to reduce the amount of data. The feature selection based on fuzzy rough sets can process a large number of continuous and discrete data to reduce the data dimension, making the selected feature subset highly correlated with the classification but less dependent on other features. In this paper, a new method of fuzzy rough feature selection is proposed which combines the membership function determination method of fuzzy c-means clustering and fuzzy equivalence to the original selection. Different from the existing research, our method takes full advantage of knowledge about the dataset itself and the differences between datasets, which makes the features selected have a higher correlation with the classification, improves the classification accuracy, and reduces the data dimension. Experimental results on the UCI machine learning repository datasets confirmed the performance and effectiveness of our method. Compared to the existing method, smaller subsets of features and an average of 1% higher classification accuracies were achieved.