RSO: A Novel Reinforced Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Feature Selection

TL;DR

This paper introduces RSO, a hybrid reinforcement learning and swarm optimization algorithm, which improves feature selection by reducing premature convergence and outperforming existing methods on multiple datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Reinforced Swarm Optimization algorithm combining Bee Swarm Optimization with Reinforcement Learning for enhanced feature selection.

Findings

RSO outperforms BSO in 88% of cases.

RSO achieves the best results in 76% of datasets.

The hybrid approach balances exploration and exploitation effectively.

Abstract

Swarm optimization algorithms are widely used for feature selection before data mining and machine learning applications. The metaheuristic nature-inspired feature selection approaches are used for single-objective optimization tasks, though the major problem is their frequent premature convergence, leading to weak contribution to data mining. In this paper, we propose a novel feature selection algorithm named Reinforced Swarm Optimization (RSO) leveraging some of the existing problems in feature selection. This algorithm embeds the widely used Bee Swarm Optimization (BSO) algorithm along with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to maximize the reward of a superior search agent and punish the inferior ones. This hybrid optimization algorithm is more adaptive and robust with a good balance between exploitation and exploration of the search space. The proposed method is evaluated on 25 widely known UCI datasets containing a perfect blend of balanced and imbalanced data. The obtained results are compared with several other popular and recent feature selection algorithms with similar classifier configurations. The experimental outcome shows that our proposed model outperforms BSO in 22 out of 25 instances (88%). Moreover, experimental results also show that RSO performs the best among all the methods compared in this paper in 19 out of 25 cases (76%), establishing the superiority of our proposed method.