New approaches to fuzzy-rough feature selection

Abstract

There has been great interest in developing methodologies that are capable of dealing with imprecision and uncertainty. The large amount of research currently being carried out in fuzzy and rough sets is representative of this. Many deep relationships have been established, and recent studies have concluded as to the complementary nature of the two methodologies. Therefore, it is desirable to extend and hybridize the underlying concepts to deal with additional aspects of data imperfection. Such developments offer a high degree of flexibility and provide robust solutions and advanced tools for data analysis. Fuzzy-rough set-based feature (FS) selection has been shown to be highly useful at reducing data dimensionality but possesses several problems that render it ineffective for large datasets. This paper proposes three new approaches to fuzzy-rough FS-based on fuzzy similarity relations. In particular, a fuzzy extension to crisp discernibility matrices is proposed and utilized. Initial experimentation shows that the methods greatly reduce dimensionality while preserving classification accuracy.