Dimensionality reduction with unsupervised feature selection and applying non-Euclidean norms for classification accuracy

This article presents a two-phase scheme to select reduced number of features from a dataset using Genetic Algorithm (GA) and testing the classification accuracy (CA) of the dataset with the reduced feature set. In the first phase of the proposed work, an unsupervised approach to select a subset of features is applied. GA is used to select stochastically reduced number of features with Sammon Error as the fitness function. Different subsets of features are obtained. In the second phase, each of the reduced features set is applied to test the CA of the dataset. The CA of a data set is validated using supervised k-nearest neighbor (k-nn) algorithm. The novelty of the proposed scheme is that each reduced feature set obtained in the first phase is investigated for CA using the k-nn classification with different Minkowski metric i.e. non-Euclidean norms instead of conventional Euclidean norm (L2). Final results are presented in the article with extensive simulations on seven real and one synthetic, data sets. It is revealed from the proposed investigation that taking different norms produces better CA and hence a scope for better feature subset selection.