An ensemble of intelligent water drop algorithm for feature selection optimization problem.

•FS-MRMC-IWD is introduced as an ensemble of the IWD for feature selection.•The potential of the MRMC-IWD using real-world optimization is assessed.•The FS-MRMC-IWD is evaluated using benchmark optimization tasks.•The FS-MRMC-IWD is evaluated using two real-world problems•Comparative studies are conducted to the classification accuracy and feature reduction.