A Survey on Evolutionary Feature Selection in Multilabel Classification
Emrah Hançer, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang · IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation · 2025
Multi-label classification (MLC) involves assigning multiple labels to each instance from a predefined set of labels. With the increasing prevalence of multi-label datasets in real-world problems, MLC has become a popular area of research. These datasets frequently contain irrelevant, redundant, or noisy features, highlighting the importance of feature selection in MLC tasks. As a result, numerous multi-label feature selection (MLFS) approaches have been introduced in the literature. Given their effective search capabilities, evolutionary computation (EC) techniques have been adopted to develop MLFS approaches. However, there is a notable absence of a comprehensive survey dedicated to EC-based MLFS approaches to MLC tasks. Although few attempts have been made to address this gap, they do not provide detailed discussions on EC-based approaches. They also tend to overlook the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches, especially regarding search, optimization, and evaluation processes. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting a comprehensive survey of EC-based MLFS approaches, focusing on the latest advancements, current challenges, and future directions. To be specific, we categorize EC-based MLFS approaches based on different criteria and provide detailed descriptions for each category.