Chaotic Atom Search Optimization for Feature Selection

Due to the lack of experience and prior knowledge, the selection of the most informative features has become one of the challenging problems in many applications. Recently, many metaheuristic algorithms have widely used to solve the feature selection problem for classification tasks. In this paper, the chaotic atom search optimization (CASO) that integrates the chaotic maps into atom search optimization (ASO) is applied for wrapper feature selection. Twelve different chaotic maps are used to adjust the parameter of CASO through the optimization process, which is beneficial for enhancing the convergence rate and improving the efficiency of ASO algorithm. In this study, twenty benchmark datasets acquired from the UCI machine learning repository are used to validate the performance of CASO in feature selection. Several state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms are adopted to examine the efficacy and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our results indicated that the Logistic-Tent map was the most suitable chaotic map to boost the performance of CASO. The experimental result shows the capability of CASO not only in finding the optimal solution but also in significantly improving the prediction accuracy and reducing the number of features.