Teaching Learning-Based Optimization With Evolutionary Binarization Schemes for Tackling Feature Selection Problems
Thaer Thaher, Majdi Mafarja, Hamza Turabieh, Pedro Á. Castillo, Hossam Faris, Ibrahim Aljarah
Abstract
Machine learning techniques heavily rely on available training data in a data set. Certain features in the data can interfere with the learning process, so it is required to remove irrelevant and redundant features to build a robust training model. As such, several feature selection techniques are usually applied in a pre-processing phase to obtain the most appropriate set of features and improve the overall learning process. In this paper, a new feature selection approach is proposed based on a modified Teaching-Learning-based Optimization (TLBO) combined with four new binarization methods: the Elitist, the Elitist Roulette, the Elitist Tournament, and the Rank-based method. The influence of these binarization methods is studied and compared to other state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results such as Shapiro-Wilk normality and Wilcoxon ranksum test show that both transfer functions and binarization approaches have a significant influence on the effectiveness of the binary TLBO. The experiments show that choosing a fitting transfer function along with a suitable binarization method has a substantial impact on the exploratory and exploitative potentials of the feature selection technique.