A New Feature Selection Method based on Monarch Butterfly Optimization and Fisher Criterion

Xiaodong Qi, Xiabi Liu, Said Boumaraf

Abstract: This paper proposes an effective feature selection method based on monarch butterfly optimization and Fisher criterion. Fisher criterion is applied to evaluate the feature subsets, based on which the optimal feature subsets are searched by using monarch butterfly optimization algorithm. To combine these two components, a method is developed to binarize continuous solution vectors for deciding the feature selection. We conduct experiments on widely used UCI (University of California, Irvine) classification datasets to study the design of our algorithm and compare it with other state-of-the-art counterparts. The experimental results show that the proposed method is reasonable and effective, which achieves the best result of feature selection among the compared methods and has satisfactory efficiency.