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The efficiency and the effectiveness of a machine learning (ML) model are greatly influenced by feature selection (FS), a crucial preprocessing step in machine learning that seeks out the ideal set of characteristics with the maximum accuracy possible. Due to their dominance over traditional optimization techniques, researchers are concentrating on a variety of metaheuristic (or evolutionary) algorithms and trying to suggest cutting-edge hybrid techniques to handle FS issues. The use of hybrid metaheuristic approaches for FS has thus been the subject of numerous research works. The purpose of this paper is to critically assess the existing hybrid FS approaches and to give a thorough literature review on the hybridization of different metaheuristic/evolutionary strategies that have been employed for supporting FS. This article reviews pertinent documents on hybrid frameworks that were published in the period from 2009 to 2022 and offers a thorough analysis of the used techniques, classifiers, datasets, applications, assessment metrics, and schemes of hybridization. Additionally, new open research issues and challenges are identified to pinpoint the areas that have to be further explored for additional study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering constitutes a well-known problem of division of unlabelled dataset into disjoint groups of data elements. It can be tackled with standard statistical methods but also with metaheuristics, which offer more flexibility and decent performance. The paper studies the application of the clustering algorithm—inspired by the territorial behaviors of predatory animals—named the Predatory Animals Algorithm (or, in short: PAA). Besides the description of the PAA, the results of its experimental evaluation, with regards to the classic k-means algorithm, are provided. It is concluded that the application of newly-created nature-inspired technique brings very promising outcomes. The discussion of obtained results is followed by areas of possible improvements and plans for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an effective stochastic algorithm that embeds a large neighborhood decomposition technique into a variable neighborhood search for solving the permutation flow-shop scheduling problem. The algorithm first constructs a permutation as a seed using a recursive application of the extended two-machine problem. In this method, the jobs are recursively decomposed into two separate groups, and, for each group, an optimal permutation is calculated based on the extended two-machine problem. Then the overall permutation, which is obtained by integrating the sub-solutions, is improved through the application of a variable neighborhood search technique. The same as the first technique, this one is also based on the decomposition paradigm and can find an optimal arrangement for a subset of jobs. In the employed large neighborhood search, the concept of the critical path has been used to help the decomposition process avoid unfruitful computation and arrange only promising contiguous parts of the permutation. In this fashion, the algorithm leaves those parts of the permutation which already have high-quality arrangements and concentrates on modifying other parts. The results of computational experiments on the benchmark instances indicate the procedure works effectively, demonstrating that solutions, in a very short distance of the best-known solutions, are calculated within seconds on a typical personal computer. In terms of the required running time to reach a high-quality solution, the procedure outperforms some well-known metaheuristic algorithms in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]