Clustering based feature selection using Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM)

Abstract

High-dimensional data contains a large number of features. With many features, high dimensional data requires immense computational resources, including space and time. Several studies indicate that not all features of high dimensional data are relevant to classification result. Dimensionality reduction is inevitable and is required due to classifier performance improvement. Several dimensionality reduction techniques were carried out, including feature selection techniques and feature extraction techniques. Sequential forward feature selection and backward feature selection are feature selection using the greedy approach. The heuristics approach is also applied in feature selection, using the Genetic Algorithm, PSO, and Forest Optimization Algorithm. PCA is the most well-known feature extraction method. Besides, other methods such as multidimensional scaling and linear discriminant analysis. In this work, a different approach is applied to perform feature selection. Cluster analysis based feature selection using Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) clustering is carried out. Our experiment results showed that classification accuracy gained when using feature vectors' medoids to represent the original dataset is high, above 80%.