Computational Methods of Feature Selection

Feature selection is an essential step for successful data mining applications and has practical significance in many areas, such as statistics, pattern recognition, machine learning, and knowledge discovery. This book covers the key concepts, representative approaches, and inventive applications of various aspects of feature selection.

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Due to increasing demands for dimensionality reduction, research on feature selection has deeply and widely expanded into many fields, including computational statistics, pattern recognition, machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery. Highlighting current research issues, Computational Methods of Feature Selection introduces the basic concepts and principles, state-of-the-art algorithms, and novel applications of this tool.

The book begins by exploring unsupervised, randomized, and causal feature selection. It then reports on some recent results of empowering feature selection, including active feature selection, decision-border estimate, the use of ensembles with independent probes, and incremental feature selection. This is followed by discussions of weighting and local methods, such as the ReliefF family, k-means clustering, local feature relevance, and a new interpretation of Relief. The book subsequently covers text classification, a new feature selection score, and both constraint-guided and aggressive feature selection. The final section examines applications of feature selection in bioinformatics, including feature construction as well as redundancy-, ensemble-, and penalty-based feature selection.

Through a clear, concise, and coherent presentation of topics, this volume systematically covers the key concepts, underlying principles, and inventive applications of feature selection, illustrating how this powerful tool can efficiently harness massive, high-dimensional data and turn it into valuable, reliable information.