Using support vector machines with a novel hybrid feature selection method for diagnosis of erythemato-squamous diseases

In this paper, we developed a diagnosis model based on support vector machines (SVM) with a novel hybrid feature selection method to diagnose erythemato-squamous diseases. Our proposed hybrid feature selection method, named improved F-score and Sequential Forward Search (IFSFS), combines the advantages of filter and wrapper methods to select the optimal feature subset from the original feature set. In our IFSFS, we improved the original F-score from measuring the discrimination of two sets of real numbers to measuring the discrimination between more than two sets of real numbers. The improved F-score and Sequential Forward Search (SFS) are combined to find the optimal feature subset in the process of feature selection, where, the improved F-score is an evaluation criterion of filter method, and SFS is an evaluation system of wrapper method. The best parameters of kernel function of SVM are found out by grid search technique. Experiments have been conducted on different training-test partitions of the erythemato-squamous diseases dataset taken from UCI (University of California Irvine) machine learning database. Our experimental results show that the proposed SVM-based model with IFSFS achieves 98.61% classification accuracy and contains 21 features. With these results, we conclude our method is very promising compared to the previously reported results.