A Combined Ant Colony and Differential Evolution Feature Selection Algorithm

Feature selection is an important step in many pattern recognition systems that aims to overcome the so-called curse of dimensionality problem. Although Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) proved to be a powerful technique in different optimization problems, but it still needs some improvements when applied to the feature selection problem. This is due to the fact that it builds its solutions sequentially, where in feature selection this behavior will most likely not lead to the optimal solution. In this paper, a novel feature selection algorithm based on a combination of ACO and a simple, yet powerful, Differential Evolution (DE) operator is presented. The proposed combination enhances both the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the search procedure. The new algorithm is tested on two biosignal-driven applications. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with other dimensionality reduction techniques to prove its superiority.