Advanced Antlion Optimizer with Discrete Ant Behavior for Feature Selection

Abstract

Feature selection is important for learning algorithms, and it is still an open problem. Antlion optimizer is an excellent nature inspired method, but it doesn't work well for feature selection. This paper proposes a hybrid approach called Ant-Antlion Optimizer which combines advantages of antlion's smart behavior of antlion optimizer and ant's powerful searching movement of ant colony optimization. A mutation operator is also adopted to strengthen exploration ability. Comprehensive experiments by binary classification problems show that the proposed algorithm is superiority to other state-of-art methods on four performance indicators.