Hybrid binary dragonfly enhanced particle swarm optimization algorithm for solving feature selection problems

In this paper, we present a new hybrid binary version of dragonfly and enhanced particle swarm optimization algorithm in order to solve feature selection problems. The proposed algorithm is called Hybrid Binary Dragonfly Enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm(HBDESPO). In the proposed HBDESPO algorithm, we combine the dragonfly algorithm with its ability to encourage diverse solutions with its formation of static swarms and the enhanced version of the particle swarm optimization exploiting the data with its ability to converge to the best global solution in the search space. In order to investigate the general performance of the proposed HBDESPO algorithm, the proposed algorithm is compared with the original optimizers and other optimizers that have been used for feature selection in the past. Further, we use a set of assessment indicators to evaluate and compare the different optimizers over 20 standard data sets obtained from the UCI repository. Results prove the ability of the proposed HBDESPO algorithm to search the feature space for optimal feature combinations.