An efficient adaptive-mutated Coati optimization algorithm for feature selection and global optimization

The feature selection (FS) problem has occupied a great interest of scientists lately since the highly dimensional datasets might have many redundant and irrelevant features. FS aims to eliminate such features and select the most important ones that affect classification performance. Metaheuristic algorithms are the best choice to solve this combinatorial problem. Recent researchers invented and adapted new algorithms, hybridized many algorithms, or enhanced existing ones by adding some operators to solve the FS problem. In our paper, we added some operators to the Coati optimization algorithm (CoatiOA). The first operator is the adaptive s-best mutation operator to enhance the balance between exploration and exploitation. The second operator is the directional mutation rule that opens the way to discover the search space thoroughly. The final enhancement is controlling the search direction toward the global best. We tested the proposed mCoatiOA algorithm in solving) in solving challenging problems from the CEC'20 test suite. mCoatiOA performance was compared with Dandelion Optimizer (DO), African vultures optimization algorithm (AVOA), Artificial gorilla troops optimizer (GTO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), Fick's Law Algorithm (FLA), Particle swarm optimization (PSO), Harris hawks optimization (HHO), and Tunicate swarm algorithm (TSA). According to the average fitness, it can be observed that the proposed method, mCoatiOA, performs better than the other optimization algorithms on 8 test functions. It has lower average standard deviation values compared to the competitive algorithms. Wilcoxon test showed that the results obtained by mCoatiOA are significantly different from those of the other rival algorithms. mCoatiOA has been tested as a feature selection algorithm. Fifteen benchmark datasets of various types were collected from the UCI machine-learning repository. Different evaluation criteria are used to determine the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed mCoatiOA achieved better results in comparison with other published methods. It achieved the mean best results on 75% of the datasets.