Attribute Reduction Based on Rough Set Theory by Soccer League Competition Algorithm

Increasing the dimension of the databases have involved the attribute reduction as a critical issue in data mining that it searches to find a subset of attributes with the most effectiveness on the hidden patterns. In the current years, the rough set theory has been considered by researchers as one of the most effective and efficient tools to the reduction. In this paper, the soccer league competition algorithm is modified and adopted to solve the attribute reduction problem for the first time. The ability to escape the local optimal, the ability to use the information distributed by players in the search space, the rapid convergence to the optimal solutions, and the low algorithm’s parameters were the motivation of considering the algorithm in the current research. The proposed ideas to modify the algorithm consist of utilizing the total power of fixed and saved players in calculating the power of each team, considering the combination of continuous and discrete structures for each player, proposing a novel discretization method, providing a hydraulic analysis appropriate to the research problem for evaluating each player, designing correction in Imitation and Provocation operators based on the challenges in their original version. The proposed ideas are performed on small, medium and large data sets from UCI and the experimental results are compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. This comparison shows that the competitive advantages of the proposed algorithm over the investigated algorithms.