Weighted rank aggregation based on ranker accuracies for feature selection

Rank aggregation is the combination of several ranked lists from a set of candidates to achieve a better ranking by combining information from different sources. In feature selection problem, due to the heterogeneity of methods, there are some base rankers (Filter-based methods) that are of diverse quality and usually the ground truth of ratings is not available. Existing rank aggregation methods that take the diverse quality of base rankers into account do not have any explicit approach for appropriate weighting, require prior assumptions, and suffers from high computational complexity. In this paper, to overcome these challenges, an efficient unsupervised method is introduced for estimating the base rankers’ qualities and aggregating the rankers based on the estimated weights. We first compute the ratio of disagreement between base rankers in ordering different element pairs and then estimate the accuracies in a way that to minimize the discrepancy between these computed ratios and their analytical counterparts. We use the weighted majority voting method for obtaining the aggregated results. To resolve the probable inconsistencies in the final aggregation, the result is formed as a graph, and a greedy algorithm is used to find an acyclic subgraph with the highest weigh. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, nine standard UCI datasets are used. The obtained results by the proposed method have higher values of classifier measures than the existing baseline Feature Selection methods and rank aggregation-based multi-filter methods in the most datasets. The experiments show that rank aggregation-based Feature Selection methods outperform individual methods. The proposed method also shows the weight of each Filter-based Feature Selection method, in which the MRMR method has a higher weight than other methods. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025.