Feature Subset Selection: A Correlation-Based SVM Filter Approach

The central criterion of feature selection is that good feature sets contain features that are highly correlated with the output, yet uncorrelated with each other. Based on this criterion, we address the problem of feature selection through correlation-based feature clustering and support vector machine (SVM) based feature ranking. Correlation-based clustering is proposed to group features into some clusters based on the correlation between two features. As a result, a feature is highly correlated to any other feature in the same cluster but uncorrelated to the features in other clusters. From each cluster, we select a feature as the delegate based on its influence quantities on the output. The influence quantities are measured by the feature sensitivity in the SVM. The proposed approach can identify relevant features and eliminate redundancy among them effectively. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through comparisons with other methods using real-world data with different dimensions. (C) 2011 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.