Information granularity-based incremental feature selection for partially labeled hybrid data

Feature selection can reduce the dimensionality of data effectively. Most of the existing feature selection approaches using rough sets focus on the static single type data. However, in many real-world applications, data sets are the hybrid data including symbolic, numerical and missing features. Meanwhile, an object set in the hybrid data often changes dynamically with time. For the hybrid data, since acquiring all the decision labels of them is expensive and time-consuming, only small portion of the decision labels for the hybrid data is obtained. Therefore, in this paper, incremental feature selection algorithms based on information granularity are developed for dynamic partially labeled hybrid data with the variation of an object set. At first, the information granularity is given to measure the feature significance for partially labeled hybrid data. Then, incremental mechanisms of information granularity are proposed with the variation of an object set. On this basis, incremental feature selection algorithms with the variation of a single object and group of objects are proposed, respectively. Finally, extensive experimental results on different UCI data sets demonstrate that compared with the non-incremental feature selection algorithms, incremental feature selection algorithms can select a subset of features in shorter time without losing the classification accuracy, especially when the group of objects changes dynamically, the group incremental feature selection algorithm is more efficient.