RF-SEA-Based Feature Selection for Data Classification in Medical Domain

Dimensionality reduction is an essential problem in data analysis that has received a significant amount of attention from several disciplines. It includes two types of methods, i.e., feature extraction and feature selection. In this paper, we introduce a simple method for supervised feature selection for data classification tasks. The proposed hybrid feature selection mechanism (HFS), i.e., RF-SEA (ReliefF-Shapley ensemble analysis) which combines both filter and wrapper models for dimension reduction. In the first stage, we use the filter model to rank the features by the ReliefF(RF) between classes and then choose the highest relevant features to the classes with the help of the threshold. In the second stage, we use Shapley ensemble algorithm to evaluate the contribution of features to the classification task in the ranked feature subset and principal component analysis (PCA) is carried out as preprocessing step before both the steps. Experiments with several medical datasets proves that our proposed approach is capable of detecting completely irrelevant features and remove redundant features without significantly hurting the performance of the classification algorithm and also experimental results show obviously that the RF-SEA method can obtain better classification performance than singly Shapley-value-based or ReliefF (RF)-algorithm based method.