A Unified View of Causal and Non-causal Feature Selection

In this paper, we unify causal and non-causal feature selection methods based on the Bayesian network framework. We first show that the objectives of causal and non-causal feature selection methods are equal and are to find the Markov blanket of a class attribute, the theoretically optimal feature set for classification. We demonstrate that causal and non-causal feature selection take different assumptions of dependency among features to find Markov blanket, and their algorithms are shown different level of approximation for finding Markov blanket. In this framework, we are able to analyze the sample and error bounds of casual and non-causal methods. We conducted extensive experiments to show the correctness of our theoretical analysis.