Feature selection

About: Feature selection is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 41478 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1024563 citations. The topic is also known as: attribute selection.

Statistical pattern recognition: a review

Abstract: The primary goal of pattern recognition is supervised or unsupervised classification. Among the various frameworks in which pattern recognition has been traditionally formulated, the statistical approach has been most intensively studied and used in practice. More recently, neural network techniques and methods imported from statistical learning theory have been receiving increasing attention. The design of a recognition system requires careful attention to the following issues: definition of pattern classes, sensing environment, pattern representation, feature extraction and selection, cluster analysis, classifier design and learning, selection of training and test samples, and performance evaluation. In spite of almost 50 years of research and development in this field, the general problem of recognizing complex patterns with arbitrary orientation, location, and scale remains unsolved. New and emerging applications, such as data mining, web searching, retrieval of multimedia data, face recognition, and cursive handwriting recognition, require robust and efficient pattern recognition techniques. The objective of this review paper is to summarize and compare some of the well-known methods used in various stages of a pattern recognition system and identify research topics and applications which are at the forefront of this exciting and challenging field.

Bayesian Model Selection in Social Research

Abstract: It is argued that P-values and the tests based upon them give unsatisfactory results, especially in large samples. It is shown that, in regression, when there are many candidate independent variables, standard variable selection procedures can give very misleading results. Also, by selecting a single model, they ignore model uncertainty and so underestimate the uncertainty about quantities of interest. The Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing, model selection, and accounting for model uncertainty is presented. Implementing this is straightforward through the use of the simple and accurate BIC approximation, and it can be done using the output from standard software. Specific results are presented for most of the types of model commonly used in sociology. It is shown that this approach overcomes the difficulties with P-values and standard model selection procedures based on them. It also allows easy comparison of nonnested models, and permits the quantification of the evidence for a null hypothesis of interest, such as a convergence theory or a hypothesis about societal norms.

A Comparative Study on Feature Selection in Text Categorization

Abstract: This paper is a comparative study of feature selection methods in statistical learning of text categorization The focus is on aggres sive dimensionality reduction Five meth ods were evaluated including term selection based on document frequency DF informa tion gain IG mutual information MI a test CHI and term strength TS We found IG and CHI most e ective in our ex periments Using IG thresholding with a k nearest neighbor classi er on the Reuters cor pus removal of up to removal of unique terms actually yielded an improved classi cation accuracy measured by average preci sion DF thresholding performed similarly Indeed we found strong correlations between the DF IG and CHI values of a term This suggests that DF thresholding the simplest method with the lowest cost in computation can be reliably used instead of IG or CHI when the computation of these measures are too expensive TS compares favorably with the other methods with up to vocabulary reduction but is not competitive at higher vo cabulary reduction levels In contrast MI had relatively poor performance due to its bias towards favoring rare terms and its sen sitivity to probability estimation errors

A review of feature selection techniques in bioinformatics

Abstract: Feature selection techniques have become an apparent need in many bioinformatics applications. In addition to the large pool of techniques that have already been developed in the machine learning and data mining fields, specific applications in bioinformatics have led to a wealth of newly proposed techniques. In this article, we make the interested reader aware of the possibilities of feature selection, providing a basic taxonomy of feature selection techniques, and discussing their use, variety and potential in a number of both common as well as upcoming bioinformatics applications. Contact: yvan.saeys@psb.ugent.be Supplementary information: http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/supplementary_data/yvsae/fsreview

Statistical Pattern Recognition

Abstract: The primary goal of pattern recognition is supervised or unsupervised classification. Among the various frameworks in which pattern recognition has been traditionally formulated, the statistical ap...