Simple stopping criteria for information theoretic feature selection

Abstract--Information theoretic feature selection aims to select a smallest feature subset such that the mutual information between the selected features and the class labels is maximized. Despite the simplicity of this objective, there still remains several open problems to optimize it. These include, for example, the automatic determination of the optimal subset size (i.e., the number of features) or a stopping criterion if the greedy searching strategy is adopted. In this letter, we suggest two stopping criteria by just monitoring the conditional mutual information (CMI) among groups of variables. Using the recently developed multivariate matrix-based Rényi's α-entropy functional, we show that the CMI among groups of variables can be easily estimated without any decomposition or approximation, hence making our criteria easily implemented and seamlessly integrated into any existing information theoretic feature selection methods with greedy search strategy. I. INTRODUCTION Feature selection finds a smallest feature subset that yields the minimum generalization error [1].