Abstract:Feature selection is a fundamental machine learning and data mining task, involved with discriminating redundant features from informative ones. It is an attempt to address the curse of dimensionality by removing the redundant features, while unlike dimensionality reduction methods, preserving explainability. Feature selection is conducted in both supervised and unsupervised settings, with different evaluation metrics employed to determine which feature selection algorithm is the best. In this paper, we propose FSEVAL, a feature selection evaluation toolbox accompanied with a visualization dashboard, with the goal to make it easy to comprehensively evaluate feature selection algorithms. FSEVAL aims to provide a standardized, unified, evaluation and visualization toolbox to help the researchers working in the field, conduct extensive and comprehensive evaluation of feature selection algorithms with ease.




Abstract:Measuring inter-dataset similarity is an important task in machine learning and data mining with various use cases and applications. Existing methods for measuring inter-dataset similarity are computationally expensive, limited, or sensitive to different entities and non-trivial choices for parameters. They also lack a holistic perspective on the entire dataset. In this paper, we propose two novel metrics for measuring inter-dataset similarity. We discuss the mathematical foundation and the theoretical basis of our proposed metrics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics by investigating two applications in the evaluation of synthetic data and in the evaluation of feature selection methods. The theoretical and empirical studies conducted in this paper illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics.
Abstract:Expressive evaluation metrics are indispensable for informative experiments in all areas, and while several metrics are established in some areas, in others, such as feature selection, only indirect or otherwise limited evaluation metrics are found. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation metric to address several problems of its predecessors and allow for flexible and reliable evaluation of feature selection algorithms. The proposed metric is a dynamic metric with two properties that can be used to evaluate both the performance and the stability of a feature selection algorithm. We conduct several empirical experiments to illustrate the use of the proposed metric in the successful evaluation of feature selection algorithms. We also provide a comparison and analysis to show the different aspects involved in the evaluation of the feature selection algorithms. The results indicate that the proposed metric is successful in carrying out the evaluation task for feature selection algorithms. This paper is an extended version of a paper accepted at SISAP 2024.