Attribute Reduction Based on <span style="font-variant: small-caps">Lift</span> and Random Sampling

As one of the key topics in the development of neighborhood rough set, attribute reduction has attracted extensive attentions because of its practicability and interpretability for dimension reduction or feature selection. Although the random sampling strategy has been introduced in attribute reduction to avoid overfitting, uncontrollable sampling may still affect the efficiency of search reduct. By utilizing inherent characteristics of each label, Multi-label learning with Label specIfic FeaTures (Lift) algorithm can improve the performance of mathematical modeling. Therefore, here, it is attempted to use Lift algorithm to guide the sampling for reduce the uncontrollability of sampling. In this paper, an attribute reduction algorithm based on Lift and random sampling called ARLRS is proposed, which aims to improve the efficiency of searching reduct. Firstly, Lift algorithm is used to choose the samples from the dataset as the members of the first group, then the reduct of the first group is calculated. Secondly, random sampling strategy is used to divide the rest of samples into groups which have symmetry structure. Finally, the reducts are calculated group-by-group, which is guided by the maintenance of the reducts’ classification performance. Comparing with other 5 attribute reduction strategies based on rough set theory over 17 University of California Irvine (UCI) datasets, experimental results show that: (1) ARLRS algorithm can significantly reduce the time consumption of searching reduct; (2) the reduct derived from ARLRS algorithm can provide satisfying performance in classification tasks