Facing the classification of binary problems with a hybrid system based on quantum-inspired binary gravitational search algorithm and K-NN method

Since given classification data often contains redundant, useless or misleading features, feature selection is an important pre-processing step for solving classification problems. This problem is often solved by applying evolutionary algorithms to decrease the dimensional number of features involved. Removing irrelevant features in the feature space and identifying relevant features correctly is the primary objective, which can increase classification accuracy. In this paper, a novel QBGSA-K-NN hybrid system which hybridizes the quantum-inspired binary gravitational search algorithm (QBGSA) with the K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) method with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) is proposed. The main aim of this system is to improve classification accuracy with an appropriate feature subset in binary problems. We evaluate the proposed hybrid system on several UCI machine learning benchmark examples. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to select the discriminating input features correctly and achieve high classification accuracy which is comparable to or better than well-known similar classifier systems. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.