Feature subset selection: a correlation based filter approach
Mark A. Hall, Lloyd A. Smith · Research Commons (University of Waikato) · 1997
Recent work has shown that feature subset selection can have a positive affect on the performance of machine learning algorithms. Some algorithms can be slowed or their performance adversely affected by too much data#some of which may be irrelevant or redundant to the learning task. Feature subset selection, then, is a method for enhancing the performance of learning algorithms, reducing the hypothesis search space, and, in some cases, reducing the storage requirement. This paper describes a feature subset selector that uses a correlation based heuristic to determine the #goodness# of feature subsets, and evaluates its effectiveness with three common ML algorithms: a decision tree inducer (C4.5), a naive Bayes classifier, and an instance based learner (IB1). Experiments using a number of standard data sets drawn from real and artificial domains are presented. Feature subset selection gave significant improvement for all three algorithms; C4.5 generated smaller decision trees. 1. Intro...