Feature Selection for Complex Patterns

Feature selection is an important data preprocessing step in data mining and pattern recognition. Many algorithms have been proposed in the past for simple patterns that can be characterised by a single feature vector. Unfortunately, these algorithms are hardly applicable to what are referred as complex patterns that have to be described by a finite set of feature vectors. This paper addresses the problem of feature selection for the complex patterns. First, we formulated the calculation of mutual information for complex patterns based on Gaussian mixture model. A hybrid feature selection algorithm is then proposed based on the formulated mutual information calculation (filter) and Baysian classification (wrapper). Experimental results on XM2VTS speaker recognition database have not only verified the performance of the proposed algorithm, but also demonstrated that traditional feature selection algorithms designed for simple patterns would perform poorly for complex patterns.