A Curriculum-Based Approach for Feature Selection

Curriculum learning is a learning technique in which a classifier learns from easy samples first and then from increasingly difficult samples. On similar lines, a curriculum based feature selection framework is proposed for identifying most useful features in a dataset. Given a dataset, first, easy and difficult samples are identified. In general, the number of easy samples is assumed larger than difficult samples. Then, feature selection is done in two stages. In the first stage a fast feature selection method which gives feature scores is used. Feature scores are then updated incrementally with the set of difficult samples. The existing feature selection methods are not incremental in nature; entire data needs to be used in feature selection. The use of curriculum learning is expected to decrease the time needed for feature selection with classification accuracy comparable to the existing methods. Curriculum learning also allows incremental refinements in feature selection as new training samples become available. Our experiments on a number of standard datasets demonstrate that feature selection is indeed faster without sacrificing classification accuracy.