Mr²DNM: A Novel Mutual Information-Based Dendritic Neuron Model

By employing a neuron plasticity mechanism, the original dendritic neuron model (DNM) has been succeeded in the classification tasks with not only an encouraging accuracy but also a simple learning rule. However, the data collected in real world contain a lot of redundancy, which causes the process of analyzing data by DNM become complicated and time-consuming. This paper proposes a reliable hybrid model which combines a maximum relevance minimum redundancy (Mr²) feature selection technique with DNM (namely, Mr²DNM) for classifying the practical classification problems. The mutual information-based Mr² is applied to evaluate and rank the most informative and discriminative features for the given dataset. The obtained optimal feature subset is used to train and test the DNM for classifying five different problems arisen from medical, physical, and social scenarios. Experimental results suggest that the proposed Mr²DNM outperforms DNM and other six classification algorithms in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.