Practical challenges and recommendations of filter methods for feature selection

Feature selection, the process of identifying relevant features to be incorporated into a proposed model, is one of the significant steps of the learning process. It removes noise from the data to increase the learning performance while reducing the computational complexity. The literature review indicated that most previous studies had focused on improving the overall classifier performance or reducing costs associated with training time during building of the classifiers. However, in this era of big data, there is an urgent need to deal with more complex issues that makes feature selection, especially using filter-based methods, more challenging; this in terms of dimensionality, data structures, data format, domain experts’ availability, data sparsity, and result discrepancies, among others. Filter methods identify the informative features of a given dataset to establish various predictive models using mathematical models. This paper takes a new route in an attempt to pinpoint recent practical challenges associated with filter methods and discusses potential areas of development to yield better performance. Several practical recommendations, based on recent studies, are made to overcome the identified challenges and make the feature selection process simpler and more efficient.