OEbBOA: A Novel Improved Binary Butterfly Optimization Approaches With Various Strategies for Feature Selection

Binary butterfly optimization approach (bBOA) is a recent high performing feature selection algorithm presented in 2018 which is based on the food foraging behavior of butterflies. This paper tries to improve the structure of the bBOA to enhance its classification accuracy, dimension reduction and reliability in feature selection task for who are interested in the fields of data mining and pattern recognition. The new initialization strategy and differential evolution strategy are applied to reduce the randomness of bBOA's initialization and local search process. Then, a new parameter is added to make the bBOA's transfer function more adaptive to the change of exploration and exploitation. Besides, evolution population dynamics (EPD) mechanism is employed as an extension of bBOA. The new method called optimization and extension of binary butterfly optimization approaches (OEbBOA) is tested with the K nearest neighbor classier in which twenty UCI datasets and seven recent algorithms are utilized to assess the performance of the OEbBOA algorithm. The experimental results and nonparametric Wilcoxons rank sum test confirm the efficiency of the proposed OEbBOA in maximizing classification accuracy while minimizing the number of features selected.