Information Theoretic Multi-Target Feature Selection via Output Space Quantization

A key challenge in information theoretic feature selection is to estimate mutual information expressions that capture three desirable terms—the relevancy of a feature with the output, the redundancy and the complementarity between groups of features. The challenge becomes more pronounced i...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Konstantinos Sechidis, Eleftherios Spyromitros-Xioufis, Ioannis Vlahavas
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2019-08-01
Series:Entropy
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/9/855
Description
Summary:A key challenge in information theoretic feature selection is to estimate mutual information expressions that capture three desirable terms&#8212;the relevancy of a feature with the output, the redundancy and the complementarity between groups of features. The challenge becomes more pronounced in multi-target problems, where the output space is multi-dimensional. Our work presents an algorithm that captures these three desirable terms and is suitable for the well-known multi-target prediction settings of multi-label/dimensional classification and multivariate regression. We achieve this by combining two ideas&#8212;deriving low-order information theoretic approximations for the input space and using quantization algorithms for deriving low-dimensional approximations of the output space. Under the above framework we derive a novel criterion, <i>G</i>roup-JMI-Rand, which captures various high-order target interactions. In an extensive experimental study we showed that our suggested criterion achieves competing performance against various other information theoretic feature selection criteria suggested in the literature.
ISSN:1099-4300