Active Sample Selection Based Incremental Algorithm for Attribute Reduction with Rough Sets

Attribute reduction with rough sets is an effective technique for obtaining a compact and informative attribute set from a given dataset. However, traditional algorithms have no explicit provision for handling dynamic datasets where data present themselves in successive samples. Incremental algorithms for attribute reduction with rough sets have been recently introduced to handle dynamic datasets with large samples, though they have high complexity in time and space. To address the time/space complexity issue of the algorithms, this paper presents a novel incremental algorithm for attribute reduction with rough sets based on the adoption of an active sample selection process and an insight into the attribute reduction process. This algorithm first decides whether each incoming sample is useful with respect to the current dataset by the active sample selection process. A useless sample is discarded while a useful sample is selected to update a reduct. At the arrival of a useful sample, the attribute reduction process is then employed to guide how to add and/or delete attributes in the current reduct. The two processes thus constitute the theoretical framework of our algorithm. The proposed algorithm is finally experimentally shown to be efficient in time and space

Preprocessing and Feature Selection on Group Structure Analysis using Entropy and Thresholding

Many real data increase dynamically in size. We have been observing in many fields that data grow with time in size. This has led to the development of several new analytic techniques. This phenomenon occurs in several fields including economics, population studies, and medical research. As an effective and efficient mechanism to deal with such data, incremental technique has been proposed in the literature and attracted much attention, which stimulates the result in this paper. When a group of objects are added to a decision table, we first introduce incremental mechanisms for three representative information entropies and then develop a group incremental rough feature selection algorithm based on information entropy.When multiple objects are added to a decision table, the algorithm aims to find the new feature subset in a much shorter time. Experiments have been carried out on eight UCI data sets and the experimental results show that the algorithm is effective and efficient