Binary Bat Algorithm for Feature Selection

Abstract

Feature selection aims to find the most important information to save computational efforts and data storage. We formulated this task as a combinatorial optimization problem since the exponential growth of possible solutions makes an exhaustive search infeasible. In this work, we propose a new nature-inspired feature selection technique based on bats behavior, namely, binary bat algorithm The wrapper approach combines the power of exploration of the bats together with the speed of the optimum-path forest classifier to find a better data representation. Experiments in public datasets have shown that the proposed technique can indeed improve the effectiveness of the optimum-path forest and outperform some well-known swarm-based techniques. © 2013 Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.