Binary dwarf mongoose optimizer for solving high-dimensional feature selection problems

Selecting appropriate feature subsets is a vital task in machine learning. Its main goal is to remove noisy, irrelevant, and redundant feature subsets that could negatively impact the learning model’s accuracy and improve classification performance without information loss. Therefore, more advanced optimization methods have been employed to locate the optimal subset of features. This paper presents a binary version of the dwarf mongoose optimization called the BDMO algorithm to solve the high-dimensional feature selection problem. The effectiveness of this approach was validated using 18 high-dimensional datasets from the Arizona State University feature selection repository and compared the efficacy of the BDMO with other well-known feature selection techniques in the literature. The results show that the BDMO outperforms other methods producing the least average fitness value in 14 out of 18 datasets which means that it achieved 77.77% on the overall best fitness values. The result also shows BDMO demonstrating stability by returning the least standard deviation (SD) value in 13 of 18 datasets (72.22%). Furthermore, the study achieved higher validation accuracy in 15 of the 18 datasets (83.33%) over other methods. The proposed approach also yielded the highest validation accuracy attainable in the COIL20 and Leukemia datasets which vividly portray the superiority of the BDMO.