Feature selection based on a multi-strategy African vulture optimization algorithm and its application in essay scoring

Reducing the dimensions of the original data set while preserving the information as much as possible is conducive to improving the accuracy and efficiency of the model. To achieve this, this paper presents a multi-strategy African vulture optimization algorithm that is the chaotic and elite opposition-based African vulture optimization with the simplex method and differential evolution strategy(CESDAVO). Three main improvements are introduced into African vultures optimization(AVO) to improve its capabilities in this study. Firstly, the chaotic elite opposition-based learning strategy is used to initialize and diversify individual positions of vultures. Secondly, the simplex method is used to optimize those poor individuals so as to further improve the local exploitation ability of the algorithm. Thirdly, the differential evolution strategy is used to make the algorithm escape from the local optimum and improve the global optimization capability of the algorithm. The results of the ablation experiments show that mixing the three strategies greatly improves the optimization performance of the algorithm. In addition, Nine algorithms are compared with CESDAVO on 15 benchmark functions, and this experimental result shows that its optimization capability is superior to the others. Then, the proposed CESDAVO is employed for feature selection, and 12 standard datasets are used for experiments. According to the experimental results, CESDAVO obtained the highest average classification accuracy on 11 datasets and the highest feature selection rate on 8 datasets, which is significantly better than other algorithms. Finally, CESDAVO is also applied to feature reduction for essays, removing 24 features and significantly improving the classification accuracy on multiple classifiers.