Particle Swarm Algorithm for Minimal Attribute Reduction of Decision Data Tables

Attribute reduction is an important issue when dealing with huge amounts of data. It has been proved that computing the minimal reduct of a decision data table is NP-complete. Particle swarm algorithm is a new population based stochastic optimization strategy inspired by social behavior of bird flocking and fish schooling. In this paper, a novel particle swarm algorithm for the minimal reduction problem is proposed. Our algorithm gives a new idea to the minimal reduction problem. The implementation techniques of the algorithm are presented. The effectiveness is showed in the experiment