Feature and Instance Joint Selection: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Feature and Instance Joint Selection: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Wei Fan, Kunpeng Liu, Hao Liu, Hengshu Zhu, Hui Xiong, Yanjie Fu

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2016-2022. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/280

Feature selection and instance selection are two important techniques of data processing. However, such selections have mostly been studied separately, while existing work towards the joint selection conducts feature/instance selection coarsely; thus neglecting the latent fine-grained interaction between feature space and instance space. To address this challenge, we propose a reinforcement learning solution to accomplish the joint selection task and simultaneously capture the interaction between the selection of each feature and each instance. In particular, a sequential-scanning mechanism is designed as action strategy of agents and a collaborative-changing environment is used to enhance agent collaboration. In addition, an interactive paradigm introduces prior selection knowledge to help agents for more efficient exploration. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets have demonstrated improved performances.
Keywords:
Data Mining: Applications
Machine Learning: Applications