978-1-5386-1106-7/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 1427
The 2017 4th International Conference on Systems and Informatics (ICSAI 2017)
Large Margin Distribution Machine
Recursive Feature Elimination
Ge Ou, Yan Wang
*
College of Computer Science and Technology
Jilin University
Changchun, China
*E-mail: wy6868@jlu.edu.cn
Wei Pang*, George Macleod Coghill
Department of Computing Science
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, UK
*E-mail: pang.wei@abdn.ac.uk
Abstract—In order to eliminate irrelevant features for
classification, we propose a novel feature selection algorithm
called Large Margin Distribution Machine Recursive Feature
Elimination (LDM-RFE). LDM-RFE uses the latest support
vector based classification algorithm Large Margin Distribution
Machine (LDM) to evaluate all the features of samples, and then
generates a ranked feature list during the procedure of Recursive
Feature Elimination (RFE). In the experiment section, we report
promising results obtained by LDM-RFE in comparison with
several common feature selection algorithms on five UCI
benchmark datasets.
Keywords-feature selection; large margin distribution machine;
recursive feature elimination; classification
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
In classification, feature selection [1] is a very important
technique used to avoid overfitting and reduce computational
complexity [2]. There exist many feature selection algorithms
used for machine learning [3][4], however, many of them can
be used in all kinds of tasks and not specific for classification.
Some feature selection algorithms, such as Principal
Components Analysis (PCA) [5], t-test [6], and kullback-
Leibler divergence [7], can be used for any machine learning
models. But among these algorithms, Support Vector Machine
Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) [8] is specifically
aimed to deal with classification tasks and it has better
performance than other commonly used feature selection
algorithms in many problems, especially for high-dimension
problems. Furthermore, some related feature selection
algorithms for classification has been proposed. Su and Hsiao
[9] proposed a Multiclass Mahalanobis-Tanguchi system for
feature selection and simultaneous multiclassification. Wang
[10] studied a feature selection algorithm for big data
problems. Liu [11] proposed a framework for multiclass
sentiment classification. In addition, the study of classification
model has made new progress over the last few years. Zhou
and Zhang [12] proposed Large Margin Distribution Machine
(LDM) algorithm, which has better classification performance
than Support Vector Machine (SVM) [13] in the tested
problems. LDM is based on the novel theory of optimizing the
margin distribution, and it used the dual coordinate descent
(DCD) [14] strategies and the averaged stochastic gradient
descent (ASGD) [15] strategies to solve the optimization
function.
Considering the above, in this research we propose a novel
RFE algorithm for classification based on LDM, which we call
Large Margin Distribution Machine Recursive Feature
Elimination (LDM-RFE). The proposed LDM-RFE ranks
problem features by their contributions to build the LDM
model at each iteration and eliminates irrelevant features
progressively. Our proposed LDM-RFE is compared with
several commonly used feature selection algorithms, such as t-
test, PCA, and SVM-RFE. The experimental results indicate
that our proposed LDM-RFE leads to better performance than
several other algorithms on five UCI [16] benchmark data sets.
II.
BACKGROUND
Let
11
={( , ),...,( , )}
nn
Sxy xy
be a training set of
n
samples,
where
m
i
xR∈
are the input samples and
{1,1}
i
y =− +
is the
label set. The objective function in classification problems is
() ()