Fuzzy modified great deluge algorithm for attribute reduction

Abstract

This paper proposes a local search meta-heuristic free of parameter tuning to solve the attribute reduction problem. Attribute reduction can be defined as the process of finding minimal subset of attributes from an original set with minimum loss of information. Rough set theory has been used for attribute reduction with much success. However, the reduction method inside rough set theory is applicable only to small datasets, since finding all possible reducts is a time consuming process. This motivates many researchers to find alternative approaches to solve the attribute reduction problem. The proposed method, Fuzzy Modified Great Deluge algorithm (Fuzzy-mGD), has one generic parameter which is controlled throughout the search process by using a fuzzy logic controller. Computational experiments confirmed that the Fuzzy-mGD algorithm produces good results, with greater efficiency for attribute reduction, when compared with other meta-heuristic approaches from the literature.