A Mixed Feature Selection Method Considering Interaction

Feature interaction has gained considerable attention recently. However, many feature selection methods considering interaction are only designed for categorical features. This paper proposes a mixed feature selection algorithm based on neighborhood rough sets that can be used to search for interacting features. In this paper, feature relevance, feature redundancy, and feature interaction are defined in the framework of neighborhood rough sets, the neighborhood interaction weight factor reflecting whether a feature is redundant or interactive is proposed, and a neighborhood interaction weight based feature selection algorithm (NIWFS) is brought forward. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compare NIWFS with other three feature selection algorithms, including INTERACT, NRS, and NMI, in terms of the classification accuracies and the number of selected features with C4.5 and IB1. The results from ten real world datasets indicate that NIWFS not only deals with mixed datasets directly, but also reduces the dimensionality of feature space with the highest average accuracies.