Feature selection, as a data preprocessing strategy, has been proven to be effective and efficient in preparing data (especially high-dimensional data) for various data-mining and machine-learning problems. The objectives of feature selection include building simpler and more comprehensible models, improving data-mining performance, and preparing clean, understandable data. The recent proliferation of big data has presented some substantial challenges and opportunities to feature selection. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and structured overview of recent advances in feature selection research. Motivated by current challenges and opportunities in the era of big data, we revisit feature selection research from a data perspective and review representative feature selection algorithms for conventional data, structured data, heterogeneous data and streaming data. Methodologically, to emphasize the differences and similarities of most existing feature selection algorithms for conventional data, we categorize them into four main groups: similarity-based, information-theoretical-based, sparse-learning-based, and statistical-based methods. To facilitate and promote the research in this community, we also present an open source feature selection repository that consists of most of the popular feature selection algorithms (http://featureselection.asu.edu/). Also, we use it as an example to show how to evaluate feature selection algorithms. At the end of the survey, we present a discussion about some open problems and challenges that require more attention in future research.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3136625

Feature Selection: A Data Perspective

Feature selection in machine learning: A new perspective

A comprehensive survey on support vector machine classification: Applications, challenges and trends

A Survey on semi-supervised feature selection methods

In recent years, unsupervised feature selection methods have raised considerable interest in many research areas; this is mainly due to their ability to identify and select relevant features without needing class label information. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and structured review of the most relevant and recent unsupervised feature selection methods reported in the literature. We present a taxonomy of these methods and describe the main characteristics and the fundamental ideas they are based on. Additionally, we summarized the advantages and disadvantages of the general lines in which we have categorized the methods analyzed in this review. Moreover, an experimental comparison among the most representative methods of each approach is also presented. Finally, we discuss some important open challenges in this research area.

A review of unsupervised feature selection methods

Recently, feature selection and dimensionality reduction have become fundamental tools for many data mining tasks, especially for processing high-dimensional data such as gene expression microarray data. Gene expression microarray data comprises up to hundreds of thousands of features with relatively small sample size. Because learning algorithms usually do not work well with this kind of data, a challenge to reduce the data dimensionality arises. A huge number of gene selection are applied to select a subset of relevant features for model construction and to seek for better cancer classification performance. This paper presents the basic taxonomy of feature selection, and also reviews the state-of-the-art gene selection methods by grouping the literatures into three categories: supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised. The comparison of experimental results on top 5 representative gene expression datasets indicates that the classification accuracy of unsupervised and semi-supervised feature selection is competitive with supervised feature selection.

Supervised, Unsupervised, and Semi-Supervised Feature Selection: A Review on Gene Selection

Gene expression data always suffer from the high dimensionality issue, therefore feature selection becomes a fundamental tool in the analysis of cancer classification. Basically, the data can be collected easily without providing the label information, which is quite useful in improving the accuracy of the classification. Label information usually difficult to obtain as the labelling processes are tedious, costly and error prone. Previous studies of gene selection are mostly dedicated to supervised and unsupervised approaches. Support vector machine SVM is a common supervised technique to address gene selection and cancer classification problems. Hence, this paper aims to propose a semi-supervised SVM-based feature selection S$$^3$$VM-FS, which simultaneously exploit the knowledge from unlabelled and labelled data. Experimental results on the gene expression data of lung cancer show that S$$^3$$VM-FS achieves the higher accuracy yet requires shorter processing time compares with the well-known supervised method, SVM-based recursive feature elimination SVM-RFE and the improved method, S$$^3$$VM-RFE.

Jun Chin Ang

Papers

Supervised, Unsupervised, and Semi-Supervised Feature Selection: A Review on Gene Selection

Semi-supervised SVM-based Feature Selection for Cancer Classification using Microarray Gene Expression Data