2016 Volume E99.A Issue 12 Pages 2266-2274
Ordinal classification is a class of special tasks in machine learning and pattern recognition. As to ordinal classification, there is an ordinal structure among different decision values. The monotonicity constraint between features and decision should be taken into account as the fundamental assumption. However, in real-world applications, this assumption may be not true. Only some candidate features, instead of all, are monotonic with decision. So the existing feature selection algorithms which are designed for nominal classification or monotonic classification are not suitable for ordinal classification. In this paper, we propose a feature selection algorithm for ordinal classification based on considering the non-monotonic and monotonic features separately. We first introduce an assumption of hybrid monotonic classification consistency and define a feature evaluation function to calculate the relevance between the features and decision for ordinal classification. Then, we combine the reported measure and genetic algorithm (GA) to search the optimal feature subset. A collection of numerical experiments are implemented to show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the feature size and improve the classification performance.