A novel hybrid BPSO–SCA approach for feature selection

Nature is a great source of inspiration for solving complex problems in real-world. In this paper, a hybrid nature-inspired algorithm is proposed for feature selection problem. Traditionally, the real-world datasets contain all kinds of features informative as well as non-informative. These features not only increase computational complexity of the underlying algorithm but also deteriorate its performance. Hence, there an urgent need of feature selection method that select an informative subset of features from high dimensional without compromising the performance of the underlying algorithm. In this paper, we select an informative subset of features and perform cluster analysis by employing a cross breed approach of binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and sine cosine algorithm (SCA) named as hybrid binary particle swarm optimization and sine cosine algorithm (HBPSOSCA). Here, we employ a V-shaped transfer function to compute the likelihood of changing position for all particles. First, the effectiveness of the proposed method is tested on ten benchmark test functions. Second, the HBPSOSCA is used for data clustering problem on seven real-life datasets taken from the UCI machine learning store and gene expression model selector. The performance of proposed method is tested in comparison to original BPSO, modified BPSO with chaotic inertia weight (C-BPSO), binary moth flame optimization algorithm, binary dragonfly algorithm, binary whale optimization algorithm, SCA, and binary artificial bee colony algorithm. The conducted analysis demonstrates that the proposed method HBPSOSCA attain better performance in comparison to the competitive methods in most of the cases.