A novel attribute reduction algorithm based on rough set and improved artificial fish swarm algorithm

Attribute Reduction (AR) is an important preprocessing step for data mining. AR based on rough set is an efficient method. Its reduction performance has been verified to be better or comparable with other methods in large amount of works, but existing reduction algorithms have some problems such as slow convergent speed and probably converging to a local optimum. A novel attribute reduction algorithm based on Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm (AFSA) and rough set is proposed. For AFSA has a slow convergence rate in the later phase of iterations, normal distribution function, Cauchy distribution function, multi-parent crossover operator, mutation operator and modified minimal generation gap model are adopted to improve AFSA. The attribute reduction algorithm based on improved AFSA and rough set takes full advantages of the improved AFSA and rough set,which are faster, more efficient, simpler, and easier to be implemented. Datasets in the UC Irvine (UCI) Machine Learning Repository are selected to verify the aforementioned new method. The results show that above algorithm can search the attribute reduction set effectively, and it has low time complexity and the excellent global search ability. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.