A Partitioning Based Adaptive Method for Robust Removal of Irrelevant Features from High-dimensional Biomedical Datasets

We propose a novel method called Partitioning based Adaptive Irrelevant Feature Eliminator (PAIFE) for dimensionality reduction in high-dimensional biomedical datasets. PAIFE evaluates feature-target relationships over not only a whole dataset, but also the partitioned subsets and is extremely effective in identifying features whose relevancies to the target are conditional on certain other features. PAIFE adaptively employs the most appropriate feature evaluation strategy, statistical test and parameter instantiation. We envision PAIFE to be used as a third-party data pre-processing tool for dimensionality reduction of high-dimensional clinical datasets. Experiments on synthetic datasets showed that PAIFE consistently outperformed state-of-the-art feature selection methods in removing irrelevant features while retaining relevant features. Experiments on genomic and proteomic datasets demonstrated that PAIFE was able to remove significant numbers of irrelevant features in real-world biomedical datasets. Classification models constructed from the retained features either matched or improved the classification performances of the models constructed using all features.