Competitive Particle Swarm Optimization for Multi-Category Text Feature Selection

Multi-label feature selection is an important task for text categorization. This is because it enables learning algorithms to focus on essential features that foreshadow relevant categories, thereby improving the accuracy of text categorization. Recent studies have considered the hybridization of evolutionary feature wrappers and filters to enhance the evolutionary search process. However, the relative effectiveness of feature subset searches of evolutionary and feature filter operators has not been considered. This results in degenerated final feature subsets. In this paper, we propose a novel hybridization approach based on competition between the operators. This enables the proposed algorithm to apply each operator selectively and modify the feature subset according to its relative effectiveness, unlike conventional methods. The experimental results on 16 text datasets verify that the proposed method is superior to conventional methods.