ABSTRACT
The speedy development of intelligent technologies and gadgets has led to a drastic increment of dimensions within the datasets in recent years. Dimension reduction algorithms, such as feature selection methods, are crucial to resolving this obstacle. Currently, metaheuristic algorithms have been extensively used in feature selection tasks due to their acceptable computational cost and performance. In this article, a binary-modified version of aphid-ant mutualism (AAM) called binary aphid-ant mutualism (BAAM) is introduced to solve the feature selection problems. Like AAM, in BAAM, the intensification and diversification mechanisms are modeled via the intercommunication of aphids with other colonies' members, including aphids and ants. However, unlike AAM, the number of colonies' members can change in each iteration based on the attraction power of their leaders. Moreover, the second- and third-best individuals can take the place of the ringleader and lead the pioneer colony. Also, to maintain the population diversity, prevent premature convergence, and facilitate information sharing between individuals of colonies including aphids and ants, a random cross-over operator is utilized in BAAM. The proposed BAAM is compared with five other feature selection algorithms using several evaluation metrics. Twelve medical and nine non-medical benchmark datasets with different numbers of features, instances, and classes from the University of California, Irvine and Arizona State University repositories are considered for all the experiments. Moreover, a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) dataset is used to validate the effectiveness of the BAAM in real-world applications. Based on the acquired outcomes, the proposed BAAM outperformed other comparative methods in terms of classification accuracy using various classifiers, including K nearest neighbor, kernel-based extreme learning machine, and multi-class support vector machine, choosing the most informative features, the best and mean fitness values and convergence speed in most cases. As an instance, in the COVID-19 dataset, BAAM achieved 96.53% average accuracy and selected the most informative feature subset.