Hybridising Particle Swarm optimisation with Differential Evolution for Feature Selection in Classification

Classification has been widely studied due to its practical applications. Feature selection aims to improve the classification accuracy by selecting a small feature subset from the original full feature set. However, identification of relevant features is not trivial due to the large search space. Particle swarm optimisation (PSO) is an efficient meta-heuristic algorithm which has shown to be promising in feature selection. However, traditional PSO uses its personal best experience and its historical best experience to determine its search direction, but this learning strategy may limit its performance for feature selection due to the premature convergence. Therefore, the potential of PSO needs to be further explored. In this paper, a new evolutionary learning algorithm termed hybridising PSO with differential evolution (HPSO-DE) is proposed to develop new feature selection methods. In HPSO-DE, differential evolution is applied to breed promising and efficient exemplars for PSO to guide its search, which is expected to not only preserve the diversity of the population but also guide particles to fly to promising areas. HPSO-DE is compared with three classic PSO variants and five traditional feature selection methods on 15 classification problems. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively achieve a higher classification accuracy with a smaller feature subset than the compared methods.