Feature selection using binary particle swarm optimization and support vector machines for medical diagnosis

In this article, we propose a feature selection strategy using a binary particle swarm optimization algorithm for the diagnosis of different medical diseases. The support vector machines were used for the fitness function of the binary particle swarm optimization. We evaluated our proposed method on four databases from the machine learning repository, including the single proton emission computed tomography heart database, the Wisconsin breast cancer data set, the Pima Indians diabetes database, and the Dermatology data set. The results indicate that, with selected less number of features, we obtained a higher accuracy in diagnosing heart, cancer, diabetes, and erythematosquamous diseases. The results were compared with the traditional feature selection methods, namely, the F-score and the information gain, and a superior accuracy was obtained with our method. Compared to the genetic algorithm for feature selection, the results of the proposed method show a higher accuracy in all of the data, except in one. In addition, in comparison with other methods that used the same data, our approach has a higher performance using less number of features.