Feature Subset Selection by Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

This paper describes the application of four evolutionary algorithms to the selection of feature subsets for classification problems. Besides of a simple genetic algorithm (GA), the paper considers three estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs): a compact GA, an extended compact GA, and the Bayesian Optimization Algorithm. The objective is to determine if the EDAs present advantages over the simple GA in terms of accuracy or speed in this problem. The experiments used a Naive Bayes classifier and public-domain and artificial data sets. All the algorithms found feature subsets that resulted in higher accuracies than using all the features. However, in contrast with other studies, we did not find evidence to support or reject the use of EDAs for this problem