GeFeS: A generalized wrapper feature selection approach for optimizing classification performance

In this paper, we propose a generalized wrapper-based feature selection, called GeFeS, which is based on a parallel new intelligent genetic algorithm (GA). The proposed GeFeS works properly under different numerical dataset dimensions and sizes, carefully tries to avoid overfitting and significantly enhances classification accuracy. To make the GA more accurate, robust and intelligent, we have proposed a new operator for features weighting, improved the mutation and crossover operators, and integrated nested cross-validation into the GA process to properly validate the learning model. The k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classifier is utilized to evaluate the goodness of selected features. We have evaluated the efficiency of GeFeS on various datasets selected from the UCI machine learning repository. The performance is compared with state-of-the-art classification and feature selection methods. The results demonstrate that GeFeS can significantly generalize the proposed multi-population intelligent genetic algorithm under different sizes of two-class and multi-class datasets. We have achieved the average classification accuracy of 95.83%, 97.62%, 99.02%, 98.51%, and 94.28% while reducing the number of features from 56 to 28, 34 to 18, 279 to 135, 30 to 16, and 19 to 9 under lung cancer, dermatology, arrhythmia, WDBC, and hepatitis, respectively.