A NOVEL FEATURE SELECTION ALGORITHM WITH SUPERVISED MUTUAL INFORMATION FOR CLASSIFICATION

Feature selection is essential in data mining and pattern recognition, especially for database classification. During past years, several feature selection algorithms have been proposed to measure the relevance of various features to each class. A suitable feature selection algorithm normally maximizes the relevancy and minimizes the redundancy of the selected features. The mutual information measure can successfully estimate the dependency of features on the entire sampling space, but it cannot exactly represent the redundancies among features. In this paper, a novel feature selection algorithm is proposed based on maximum relevance and minimum redundancy criterion. The mutual information is used to measure the relevancy of each feature with class variable and calculate the redundancy by utilizing the relationship between candidate features, selected features and class variables. The effectiveness is tested with ten benchmarked datasets available in UCI Machine Learning Repository. The experimental results show better performance when compared with some existing algorithms.