Solving dimension reduction problems for classification using Promoted Crow Search Algorithm (PCSA)

In recent years, with the increasing volume of databases, the removal of redundant features has become an essential thing in classification. A smaller subset of features is selected using feature selection algorithm. One of the famous algorithms of feature selection methods is the crow search algorithm (CSA). This algorithm’s popularity can be mentioned in the algorithm’s implementation and process and the impressive results compared to the previous algorithms. Despite all these benefits, this algorithm suffers from problems such as unbalanced global and local search. It is also stuck in local optimization due to the search approach’s inadequacy. In this paper, a new algorithm based on CSA is introduced. In order to overcome the shortcoming, four fundamental changes have been made to CSA. (i) The algorithm uses the concept of dynamic awareness probability to solve the balance between exploitation and exploration. Then, a new approach is introduced for each part of the search that improves crows’ search performance both (ii) locally and (iii) globally. Also, as the last change, (iv) the concept of chaos is used to increase the algorithm’s convergence rate. The proposed method has been tested and compared with ten well-known algorithms in this field on the same datasets and has performed on average 20% better in the feature reduction index and 2.5% in the fitness index, while has a lower performance in accuracy by only 1.5%. Practical results show that the algorithm changes have provided attractive results compared to other algorithms in this field in the mentioned metrics.