Particle swarm optimization for feature selection with application in obstructive sleep apnea diagnosis

Feature selection is a preprocessing step of data mining, in which a subset of relevant features is selected for building models. Searching for an optimal feature subset from a high-dimensional feature space is an NP-complete problem; hence, traditional optimization algorithms are inefficient in solving large-scale feature selection problems. Therefore, meta-heuristic algorithms are extensively adopted to effectively address feature selection problems. In this paper, we propose an analytical approach by integrating particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the 1-NN method. The data sets collected from UCI machine learning databases were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Implementation results show that the classification accuracy of the proposed approach is significantly better than those of BPNN, LR, SVM, and C4. 5. Furthermore, the proposed approach was applied to an actual case on the diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). After implementation, we conclude that our proposed method can help identify important factors and provide a feasible model for diagnosing medical disease.