Feature selection for high-dimensional data in astronomy

With an exponentially increasing amount of astronomical data, the complexity and dimension of astronomical data are likewise growing rapidly. Extracting information from such data becomes a critical and challenging problem. For example, some algorithms can only be employed in the low-dimensional spaces, so feature selection and feature extraction become important topics. Here we describe the difference between feature selection and feature extraction methods, and introduce the taxonomy of feature selection methods as well as the characteristics of each method. We present a case study comparing the performance and computational cost of different feature selection methods. For the filter method, ReliefF and fisher filter are adopted; for the wrapper method, improved CHAID, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), Naive Bayes (NB) and C4.5 are taken as learners. Applied on the sample, the result indicates that from the viewpoints of computational cost the filter method is superior to the wrapper method. Moreover, different learning algorithms combined with appropriate feature selection methods may arrive at better performance.