An Experimental Study of SeveralDecisionIssues forFeature Selection withMulti-Layer Perceptrons

An experimental studyofseveral decision issues forwrapper Feature Selection withMulti-Layer Perceptrons is presented, namely thestopping criterion, thedatasetwhere thesaliency ismeasured andthenetwork retraining before computing thesaliency. Experimental results withtheSequential Backward Selection procedure indicate thattheincrease inthe computational costassociated withretraining thenetwork with every feature temporarily removed before computing thesaliency isrewarded withasignificant performance improvement. Despite being quite intuitive, this ideahasbeenhardly usedinpractice. Regarding thestopping criterion andthedatasetwherethe saliency ismeasured, theprocedure profits frommeasuring the saliency inavalidation set, asreasonably expected. A somehow non-intuitive conclusion canbedrawnbylooking atthestopping criterion, whereitissuggested that forcing overtraining maybe asuseful asearly stopping. I.INTRODUCTION