EHHM: Electrical Harmony Based Hybrid Meta-Heuristic for Feature Selection

Selecting the most relevant features from a high dimensional dataset is always a challenging task. In this regard, the feature selection (FS) method acts as a solution to this problem mainly in the domain of data mining and machine learning. It aims at improving the performance of a learning model greatly by choosing the relevant features and ignoring the redundant ones. Besides, this also helps to achieve efficient use of space and time by the learning model under consideration. Though over the years, many meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed by the researchers to solve FS problem, still this is considered as the open research problem due to its enormous challenges. Particularly, these algorithms, at times, suffer from poor convergence because of the improper tuning of exploration and exploitation phases. Here lies the importance of the hybrid meta-heuristics which help to improve the searching capability and convergence rate of the parent algorithms. To this end, the present work introduces a new hybrid meta-heuristic FS model by combining two meta-heuristics - Harmony Search (HS) algorithm and Artificial Electric Field Algorithm (AEFA), which we have named as Electrical Harmony based Hybrid Meta-heurtistic (EHHM). The proposed hybrid meta-heuristic converges faster than its predecessors, thereby ensuring its capability to search efficiently. Usability of EHHM is examined by applying it on 18 standard UCI datasets. Moreover, to prove its supremacy, we have compared it with 10 state-of-the-art FS methods. Link to code implementation of proposed method: khalid0007/Metaheuristic-Algorithms/FS_AEFAhHS.