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Highlights • A hybrid model (FMM-BSO) for feature selection and data classification is proposed. • Fuzzy Min–Max (FMM) is first used for incremental learning of data. • A Brain Storm Optimization (BSO) is then used for feature selection. • The outcome indicates that FMM-BSO is able to produce promising results. Abstract Swarm intelligence (SI)-based optimization methods have been extensively used to tackle feature selection problems. A feature selection method extracts the most significant features and removes irrelevant ones from the data set, in order to reduce feature dimensionality and improve the classification accuracy. This paper combines the incremental learning Fuzzy Min–Max (FMM) neural network and Brain Storm Optimization (BSO) to undertake feature selection and classification problems. Firstly, FMM is used to create a number of hyperboxes incrementally. BSO, which is inspired by the human brainstorming process, is then employed to search for an optimal feature subset. Ten benchmark problems and a real-world case study are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed FMM-BSO. In addition, the bootstrap method with the 95% confidence intervals is used to quantify the results statistically. The experimental results indicate that FMM-BSO is able to produce promising results as compared with those from the original FMM network and other state-of-the-art feature selection methods such as particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, and ant lion optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]