A Preliminary Study on the Use of Fuzzy Rough Set Based Feature Selection for Improving Evolutionary Instance Selection Algorithms

Abstract

In recent years, the increasing interest in fuzzy rough set theory has allowed the definition of novel accurate methods for feature selection. Although their stand-alone application can lead to the construction of high quality classifiers, they can be improved even more if other preprocessing techniques, such as instance selection, are considered. With the aim of enhancing the nearest neighbor classifier, we present a hybrid algorithm for instance and feature selection, where evolutionary search in the instances’ space is combined with a fuzzy rough set based feature selection procedure. The preliminary results, contrasted through nonparametric statistical tests, suggest that our proposal can improve greatly the performance of the preprocessing techniques in isolation.