Bio-Inspired Feature Selection: An Improved Binary Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

Feature selection is an effective approach to reduce the number of features of data, which enhances the performance of classification in machine learning. In this paper, we formulate a joint feature selection problem to reduce the number of the selected features while enhancing the accuracy. An improved binary particle swarm optimization (IBPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the formulated problem. IBPSO introduces a local search factor based on Lévy flight, a global search factor based on weighting inertia coefficient, a population diversity improvement factor based on mutation mechanism and a binary mechanism to improve the performance of conventional PSO and to make it suitable for the binary feature selection problems. Experiments based on 16 classical datasets are selected to test the effectiveness of the proposed IBPSO algorithm, and the results demonstrate that IBPSO has better performance than some other comparison algorithms.