The rapid growth of data generated by several applications like engineering, biotechnology, energy, and others has become a crucial challenge in the high dimensional data mining. The large amounts of data, especially those with high dimensions, may contain many irrelevant, redundant, or noisy features, which may negatively affect the accuracy and efficiency of the industrial data mining process. Recently, several meta-heuristic optimization algorithms have been utilized to evolve feature selection techniques for dealing with the vast dimensionality problem. Despite optimization algorithms’ ability to find the near-optimal feature subset of the search space, they still face some global optimization challenges. This paper proposes an improved version of the sooty tern optimization (ST) algorithm, namely the ST-AL method, to improve the search performance for high-dimensional industrial optimization problems. ST-AL method is developed by boosting the performance of STOA by applying four strategies. The first strategy is the use of a control randomization parameters that ensure the balance between the exploration–exploitation stages during the search process; moreover, it avoids falling into local optimums. The second strategy entails the creation of a new exploration phase based on the Ant lion (AL) algorithm. The third strategy is improving the STOA exploitation phase by modifying the main equation of position updating. Finally, the greedy selection is used to ignore the poor generated population and keeps it from diverging from the existing promising regions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed ST-AL algorithm, it has been employed as a global optimization method to discover the optimal value of ten CEC2020 benchmark functions. Also, it has been applied as a feature selection approach on 16 benchmark datasets in the UCI repository and compared with seven well-known optimization feature selection methods. The experimental results reveal the superiority of the proposed algorithm in avoiding local minima and increasing the convergence rate. The experimental result are compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, i.e., ALO, STOA, PSO, GWO, HHO, MFO, and MPA and found that the mean accuracy achieved is in range 0.94–1.00.
