Review Report Form

Paper Title: Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) for Feature Selection.
Reviewer's Name:
1. Umakant Prakash Shekokar, 2012MCS2838
2. Tinkle Jindal, 2012MCS2820

(A) Answer the following by selecting a choice.

1. Is the coverage of the topic sufficiently comprehensive?
a. Yes
b. No (Important information is missing)
c. No (Treatment somewhat unbalanced)
d. No (Certain parts significantly overstressed)

2. How would you describe the technical depth of the paper?
a. Suitable for the non-specialist
b. Appropriate for generally knowledgeable individual working in the field or a related
field.
c. Suitable only for an expert

3. How would you rate the technical novelty of the paper?
a. Novel
b. Somewhat novel
c. Not novel

4. How would you rate the overall organization of the paper?
a. Good
b. Satisfactory
c. Could be improved


(B) Summary of the manuscript [About 200 words.]
In classification, large number of features causes the problem of the curse of
dimensionality and not all of the features are used. Irrelevant and redundant features
may even increase the classification error rate. Feature selection could reduce the
number of features by eliminating irrelevant and redundant features, and thus result in
increased classification performance. A feature selection algorithm explores the search
space of different feature combinations to reduce the number of features and
simultaneously optimise the classification performance. This paper proposes two multi-
objective algorithms based on PSO for feature selection. The first algorithm introduces
the idea of non-dominated sorting based multi-objective genetic algorithm into PSO for
feature selection. In the second algorithm, multi-objective PSO uses the ideas of
crowding, mutation and dominance to search for the solution. According to author, the
two proposed algorithms were examined and compared with two single objective
feature selection algorithms on nine benchmark datasets (UCI) of varying difficulty. The
results suggest that two proposed algorithms can obtain a set of non-dominated
solutions, which can successfully select a small number of features and achieve higher
classification performance than using all features.

(C) Strengths and weaknesses of the paper [At least 2 strengths and 1 weakness. Write
about 2 lines per strength/weakness each]
Strengths :
1. The proposed algorithms successfully select a small number of features and achieve
higher classification performance than using all features.
2. A new fitness function is proposed with the goals of minimising both the
classification error rate and the number of features selected.
) / ( * ) 1 ( ) ( *
0 2
Error Errorrate res #All Featu #Features/ Fitness

Weakness :
The two proposed algorithms successfully reduced the number of features needed and
achieved higher classification performance, but it is unknown whether the
classification performance can be further increased without increasing the number of
features, or whether the number of features can be further reduced with similar
classification performance.

(D) Suggestions for improvement [At least 2 suggestions. Write about 3-4 lines for each
suggestion.]
1. Multi-objective PSO based feature selection should also be investigated for
exploring the non-dominated solutions in feature selection problems.
2. The reason why BPSO usually evolve a larger subset of features than continuous PSO
should be investigated further.

(E) If you are the Editor-in-Chief of a journal, will you accept the paper or reject the
paper and why [Give two reasons to support your decision, with 2-3 lines for each
reason]
I will accept the paper because:
1. The ideas of crowding, mutation and dominance are employed in the proposed FS
framework. These ideas have never been applied to FS before.
2. The idea of non-dominated sorting is employed in binary multi-objective PSO and is
then used in proposed FS framework.

(F) Any additional comment
Many studies have shown that PSO is an efficient search technique for FS. However,
development of a multi-objective FS algorithm using PSO to minimise the number of
features and thus minimise the classification error and is still an open issue. And, this
paper has proposed a very nice method based on multi-objective PSO. Also, results
have finally been compared with conventional FS methods and an increase in accuracy
can be clearly seen.