A non-linear optimization based robust attribute weighting model for the two-class classification problems

BACKGROUND: This article aims to determine the coefficients that will reduce the in-class distance and increase the distance between the classes, collecting the data around the cluster centers with meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, thus increasing the classification performance. METHODS: The proposed mathematical model is based on simple mathematical calculations, and this model is the fitness function of optimization algorithms. Compared to the methods in the literature, optimizing algorithms to obtain fast results is more accessible. Determining the weights by optimization provides more sensitive results than the dataset structure. In the study, the proposed model was used as the fitness function of the metaheuristic optimization algorithms to determine the weighting coefficients. In this context, four different structures were used to test the independence of the results obtained from the algorithm: the particle swarm algorithm (PSO), the bat algorithm (BAT), the gravitational search algorithm (GSA), and the flower pollination algorithm (FPA). RESULTS: As a result of these processes, a control group from unweighted attributes and four experimental groups from weighted attributes were obtained for each dataset. The classification performance of all datasets to which the weights obtained by the proposed method were applied increased. 100% accuracy rates were obtained in the Iris and Liver Disorders datasets used in the study. From synthetic datasets, from 66.9% (SVM classifier) to 96.4% (GSA Weighting + SVM) in the Full Chain dataset, from 64.6% (LDA classifier) to 80.2% in the Two Spiral datasets (weighted by BA + LDA). As a result of the study, it was seen that the proposed method successfully fulfills the task of moving the attributes to a linear plane in the datasets, especially in classifiers such as SVM and LDA, which have difficulties in non-linear problems, an accuracy rate of 100% was achieved.