A novel feature selection method for data mining tasks using hybrid Sine Cosine Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm

Feature selection (FS) is a real-world problem that can be solved using optimization techniques. These techniques proposed solutions to make a predictive model, which minimizes the classifier's prediction errors by selecting informative or important features by discarding redundant, noisy, and irrelevant attributes in the original dataset. A new hybrid feature selection method is proposed using the Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) and Genetic Algorithm (GA), called SCAGA. Typically, optimization methods have two main search strategies; exploration of the search space and exploitation to determine the optimal solution. The proposed SCAGA resulted in better performance when balancing between exploitation and exploration strategies of the search space. The proposed SCAGA has also been evaluated using the following evaluation criteria: classification accuracy, worst fitness, mean fitness, best fitness, the average number of features, and standard deviation. Moreover, the maximum accuracy of a classification and the minimal features were obtained in the results. The results were also compared with a basic Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) and other related approaches published in literature such as Ant Lion Optimization and Particle Swarm Optimization. The comparison showed that the obtained results from the SCAGA method were the best overall the tested datasets from the UCI machine learning repository.