Boosted sooty tern optimization algorithm for global optimization and feature selection

Feature selection (FS) represents an optimization problem that aims to simplify and improve the quality of highly dimensional datasets through selecting prominent features and eliminating redundant and irrelevant data to classify results better. The goals of FS comprise dimensionality reduction and enhancing the classification accuracy in general, accompanied by great significance in different fields like data mining applications, pattern classification, and data analysis. Using powerful optimization algorithms is crucial to obtaining the best subsets of information in FS. Different metaheuristics, such as the Sooty Tern Optimization Algorithm (STOA), help to optimize the FS problem. However, such kind of techniques tends to converge in sub-optimal solutions. To overcome this problem in the STOA, an improved version called mSTOA is introduced. It employs the balancing exploration/exploitation strategy, self-adaptive of the control parameters strategy, and population reduction strategy. The proposed approach is proposed for solving the FS problem, but also it has been validated over benchmark optimization problems from the CEC 2020. To assess the performance of the mSTOA, it has also been tested with different algorithms. The experiments in terms of FS provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of the capabilities of the mSTOA for extracting the optimal subset of features. Besides, statistical analyses and no-parametric tests were also conducted to validate the result obtained by the mSTOA in optimization.