Bagging Constraint Score for feature selection with pairwise constraints

Constraint Score is a recently proposed method for feature selection by using pairwise constraints which specify whether a pair of instances belongs to the same class or not. It has been shown that the Constraint Score, with only a small amount of pairwise constraints, achieves comparable performance to those fully supervised feature selection methods such as Fisher Score. However, one major disadvantage of the Constraint Score is that its performance is dependent on a good selection on the composition and cardinality of constraint set, which is very challenging in practice. In this work, we address the problem by importing Bagging into Constraint Score and a new method called Bagging Constraint Score (BCS) is proposed. Instead of seeking one appropriate constraint set for single Constraint Score, in BCS we perform multiple Constraint Score, each of which uses a bootstrapped subset of original given constraint set. Diversity analysis on individuals of ensemble shows that resampling pairwise constraints is helpful for simultaneously improving accuracy and diversity of individuals. We conduct extensive experiments on a series of high-dimensional datasets from UCI repository and gene databases, and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.