Fuzzy rough feature selection using a robust non-linear vague quantifier for ordinal classification.

Ordinal classification is a common classification problem, which widely exists in multi-attribute decision making problems. The dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA) is a knowledge acquisition tool for ordinal classification tasks. Nevertheless, the existence of noise information in the collected data greatly reduces the accuracy of the DRSA and some extended model. An effective way to solve this issue is to improve the robustness of these models. In addition, most existing feature selection strategies based on dominance rough sets mainly focus on the monotonic classification consistency between features and decision, but ignoring the classification information provided by features combination. Motivated by these two issues, this paper proposes a robust fuzzy dominance rough set model to combat noise interference and develop a feature selection approach based on the proposed model for ordinal classification tasks. First, a non-linear vague quantifier is adopted to construct the robust model, and related dependency function is introduced. Second, the rank entropy based uncertainty measures are explored to characterize the contribution of features combination for ordinal classification. Based on the proposed uncertainty measures, a new feature evaluation index is presented. Meanwhile, the corresponding feature selection algorithm is designed. Finally, numerical comparative experiments are performed to indicate that the proposed model and feature selection algorithm have good capability. • The fuzzy dominance rough set using a non-linear vague quantifier is proposed. • An uncertainty measure describing attribute combinations is proposed. • A classifier embedded feature selection algorithm is designed. • Experiments show the good performance of the proposed model and algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]