An evolutionary decomposition-based multi-objective feature selection for multi-label classification

Data classification is a fundamental task in data mining. Within this field, the classification of multi-labeled data has been seriously considered in recent years. In such problems, each data entity can simultaneously belong to several categories. Multi-label classification is important because of many recent real-world applications in which each entity has more than one label. To improve the performance of multi-label classification, feature selection plays an important role. It involves identifying and removing irrelevant and redundant features that unnecessarily increase the dimensions of the search space for the classification problems. However, classification may fail with an extreme decrease in the number of relevant features. Thus, minimizing the number of features and maximizing the classification accuracy are two desirable but conflicting objectives in multi-label feature selection. In this article, we introduce a multi-objective optimization algorithm customized for selecting the features of multi-label data. The proposed algorithm is an enhanced variant of a decomposition-based multi-objective optimization approach, in which the multi-label feature selection problem is divided into single-objective subproblems that can be simultaneously solved using an evolutionary algorithm. This approach leads to accelerating the optimization process and finding more diverse feature subsets. The proposed method benefits from a local search operator to find better solutions for each subproblem. We also define a pool of genetic operators to generate new feature subsets based on old generation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compare it with two other multi-objective feature selection approaches on eight real-world benchmark datasets that are commonly used for multi-label classification. The reported results of multi-objective method evaluation measures, such as hypervolume indicator and set coverage, illustrate an improvement in the results obtained by the proposed method. Moreover, the proposed method achieved better results in terms of classification accuracy with fewer features compared with state-of-the-art methods.