An Efﬁcient Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm using Chaotic Maps

for Feature Selection in the Medical Applications

Ruba Abu Khurma, Ibrahim Aljarah and Ahmad Sharieh

King Abdullah II School for Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

Keywords:

Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm (MFO), Dimensionality Problem, Classiﬁcation, Optimization, Feature

Selection (FS), Chaotic Maps.

Abstract:

In this paper, multiple variants of the Binary Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm (BMFO) based on chaotic

maps are introduced and compared as search strategies in a wrapper feature selection framework. The main

purpose of using chaotic maps is to enhance the initialization process of solutions in order to help the optimizer

alleviate the local minima and globally converge towards the optimal solution. The proposed approaches are

applied for the ﬁrst time on FS problems. Dimensionality is a major problem that adversely impacts the learn-

ing process due to data-overﬁt and long learning time. Feature selection (FS) is a preprocessing stage in a data

mining process to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset by eliminating the redundant and irrelevant noisy

features. FS is formulated as an optimization problem. Thus, metaheuristic algorithms have been proposed

to ﬁnd promising near optimal solutions for this complex problem. MFO is one of the recent metaheuristic

algorithms which has been efﬁciently used to solve various optimization problems in a wide range of appli-

cations. The proposed approaches have been tested on 23 medical datasets. The comparative results revealed

that the chaotic BMFO (CBMFO) signiﬁcantly increased the performance of the MFO algorithm and achieved

competitive results when compared with other state-of-the-arts metaheuristic algorithms.

1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years, due to advances in data collection

methods, vast amounts of data have been stored in

data repositories. This is negatively reﬂected in the

size of datasets either by increasing the number of in-

stances and/or increasing the number of features.

Curse of dimensionality is a challenging prob-

lem that causes many negative consequences for

the datamining tasks (i.e classiﬁcation, clustering)

(Khurma et al., 2020). It implies the existence of

some features that are unuseful for the learning pro-

cess such as the redundant and irrelevant features. Re-

dundant features do not add any new information to

the learning process because they can be inferred from

other features. On the other hand, irrelative features

are unrelated to the target class. These noisy fea-

tures may mislead the learning algorithm when they

are used in building the learning model. Furthermore,

they adversely affect the learner’s performance and

generate poor quality models due to data-overﬁt. In-

creasing dimensionality also consumes more learning

time and increases the demand for specialized hard-

ware resources.

Feature selection (FS) is a primary preprocessing

stage in a datamining process that has two conﬂict-

ing objectives: producing a smaller version of the

dataset by minimizing it’s dimensions and simulta-

neously maximizing the learning performance (Faris

et al., 2019; Al-Madi et al., 2018). This is accom-

plished by eliminating the noisy features (redundant

or/and irrelevant) from original dataset without caus-

ing any loss of information. Formally speaking, for a

dataset of N features, FS process selects n features

from the original N features where n ≤ N without

causing any degradation in the learner’s performance.

FS has the advantage that there is no generation of

new feature combinations so the original meaning of

the features is preserved. This is crucial for some

ﬁelds which cares about the readability of a dataset

such as bioinformatics and medicine.

The FS comprises four basic stages: subset gen-

eration, subset evaluation, checking a stopping crite-

rion and validation stage (Dash and Liu, 1997). Sub-

set generation is performed by a speciﬁc search tech-

nique (complete, heuristic) to generate candidate fea-

ture subsets. Subset evaluation determines the quality

of a generated feature subset using a particular tech-

Khurma, R., Aljarah, I. and Sharieh, A.

An Efﬁcient Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm using Chaotic Maps for Feature Selection in the Medical Applications.

DOI: 10.5220/0008960701750182

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM 2020), pages 175-182

ISBN: 978-989-758-397-1; ISSN: 2184-4313

175

nique (ﬁlter or wrapper). FS is repeated until a spec-

iﬁed condition is met (i.e maximum number of itera-

tions). The last stage is to validate the feature subset

by comparing it with the domain knowledge gathered

from experts.

With regard to the evaluation approaches. Filters

are considered rank based methods because they rely

on a predeﬁned threshold to evaluate a feature. They

don’t involve any learning algorithm but they use the

intrinsic characteristics of the features. The absence

of the learning process makes ﬁlters more time efﬁ-

cient. On the other hand, wrappers consider a learn-

ing algorithm to decide the quality of a feature sub-

set. This contributes to better performance results but

consumes more computational time.

FS search methods play a key role in controlling

the complexity of the FS process. Brute force meth-

ods create the feature space by generating all the pos-

sible feature subsets from the original features set.

Formally speaking, for n features, there are 2

fea-

ture subsets that can be generated. FS process that

involves a complete search procedure needs an ex-

ponential running time to exhaustively traverse all

the generated feature subsets. This is computation-

ally expensive and impractical with medium and large

datasets making the FS an NP-Hard problem.

Metaheuristic algorithms are stochastic search

methods that effectively generate promising solutions

(near optimal) in a less time effort. Metaheuris-

tic algorithms include a population based algorithms

that initialize multiple solutions during the optimiza-

tion process and update them in each iteration un-

til the global solution is best approximated. Popu-

lation based algorithms are further classiﬁed based

on the source of inspiration into Evolutionary Algo-

rithms (EA) and Swarm Intelligence algorithms (SI).

SIs are inspired from the social intelligence that can

be observed from the interactions between the groups

of creatures such as ﬂock of wolves, swarm of ﬁsh and

colony of bee. A well known example for SI paradigm

is the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) (Kennedy

and Eberhart, 1997).

There are many metaheuristic algorithms that have

been adopted as search engines in a wrapper frame-

work and proved their effectiveness to limit the com-

plexity of FS problem and provide acceptable solu-

tions within a bounded time frame. These include

the well-regarded algorithms such as GA (Huang and

Wang, 2006) and PSO (Jain et al., 2018) and the

recent metaheuristic algorithms such as Whale Op-

timization Algorithm (WOA) (Sayed et al., 2018a),

Multi-Verse Optimization algorithm (MVO) (Ewees

et al., 2019) and Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) (Sayed

et al., 2018b).

Moth Flame Optimization algorithm (MFO) is a

recently developed SI algorithm that mimics the navi-

gation method of moths at night. MFO proved it’s ef-

fectiveness in optimizing various complex optimiza-

tion problems in different ﬁelds (Mirjalili, 2015).

Like any population based paradigm, the MFO opti-

mizer has two conﬂicting milestones in the optimiza-

tion process called exploration and exploitation. In

the exploration phase, the search space is searched

to identify promising regions where the best solution

may exist while in the exploitation phase, the found

solutions are further improved. The main target in the

optimization process is to maintain a balance between

exploration and exploitation and smoothly alternates

between them. Too much exploration loses the opti-

mal solution while too much exploitation causes stag-

nation in a local minima.

The MFO algorithm has many advantages that

motivated us to select it as a search algorithm in wrap-

per frameworks: First, the search engine of the MFO

methodology relies on a spiral position update pro-

cedure that can change the positions of moths in a

manner that achieves a promising trade off between

the exploration and exploitation and adaptively con-

verges toward the optimal solution. Second, it had

been used to solve many problems with unknown and

constrained search spaces (Mirjalili, 2015). Third,

MFO algorithm is equipped with adaptive parameters

that increase exploration phase in the early stages of

the optimization process and increase the exploitation

in the ﬁnal stages. Fourth, MFO always maintains the

best solutions obtained and reduces their numbers in

each iteration so that it gets one global best solution in

the ﬁnal stage. Despite the promising characteristics

of the MFO algorithm, the search agents still have a

chance of being entrapped in local minima.

Chaotic maps are commonly used operators that

have been used to replace random components and

support convergence of multiple metaheuristic algo-

rithms. In 2007, Chaotic maps were hybridized with

PSO algorithm to develop a feasible approach for FS

and classiﬁcation of the hyper spectral image data

(YANG et al., 2007). In 2011, a hybrid model for

FS and classiﬁcation of large-dimensional microar-

ray data sets was developed by using correlation-

based FS (CFS) and the Taguchi Chaotic Binary PSO

(TCBPSO) (Chuang et al., 2011). The same author,

in the same year, designed a chaotic BPSO (CBPSO)

based on two kinds of chaotic maps called logistic

maps and tent maps that were integrated with BPSO

to determine the inertia weight of the BPSO to en-

hance the FS process. In 2017, chaotic maps were in-

tegrated with the MVO algorithm in the the context of

FS to cope with slow convergence and local minima

ICPRAM 2020 - 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods

176

problems. The used chaotic maps were Tent, Logistic,

Singer, Sinusoidal and Piecewise (Ewees et al., 2019).

An improved SSA was developed in 2018 to handle

the FS problem. Chaos theory was integrated into

the algorithm to replace the random variables with

chaotic variables. The developed approach was able

to efﬁciently mitigate the local minima and low con-

vergence problems (Sayed et al., 2018b). In 2018, a

new wrapper FS approach was developed based on

WOA and chaotic theory named CWOA in the medi-

cal application (Sayed et al., 2018a).

According to No-free-Lunch theorem (Wolpert

et al., 1997), there is no metaheuristic algorithm that

has the same performance with all optimization prob-

lems. Thus, the doors are still opened to propose new

modiﬁcations to enhance metaheuristic algorithms. In

in this paper, chaotic maps have been proposed for

the ﬁrst time to enhance the MFO ability in the FS

binary space. The main contribution is the develop-

ment of four binary variants of the MFO algorithm

through the use of four different chaotic maps. The

main purpose is to improve the initialization strategy

of the standard MFO algorithm by replacing the uni-

form random distribution with chaotic equations. The

generated CBMFO variants are studied and compared

to analyze the inﬂuence of the adopted operators on

the BMFO performance while optimizing the feature

space in the domain of disease diagnosis.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives

an overview of the standard and binary MFO algo-

rithm. Section 3 discusses the proposed approach. In

Section 4, the experimental results are analyzed. Fi-

nally, in Section 5, conclusions and future works are

outlined.

2 METHODOLOGY

2.1 Overview of MFO

Moth Flame Optimization (MFO) is one of the re-

cent SI algorithms which was developed in (Mirjalili,

2015). The MFO methodology was inspired by the

natural movements of moths at night. The moths

are enabled to move long distances in straight line

by maintaining the same angle with respect to moon

light. This navigation method is called transfer ori-

entation. However, transfer orientation has the short-

coming that nearby light sources such as candle fool

the moths and force them to follow a spiral path until

they eventually die.

Eq.1 describes mathematically the natural spiral

motion of moths around a ﬂame where M

represents

the i

moth, F j represents the j

ﬂame, and S is the

spiral function. Eq.2 formulates the spiral motion us-

ing a standard logarithmic function where D

is the

distance between the i

moth and the j

ﬂame as de-

scribed in Eq.3, b is a constant value for determining

the shape of the logarithmic spiral, and t is a random

number in the range [-1, 1]. The parameter t = −1

indicates the closest position of a moth to a ﬂame

where t = 1 indicates the farthest position between

a moth and a ﬂame. To achieve more exploitation

in the search space the t parameter is considered in

the range [r,1] where r is linearly decreased over the

course of iterations from -1 to -2. Eq.4 shows gradual

decrements of the number of ﬂames over the course of

iterations where l is the current number of iteration, N

is the maximum number of ﬂames and T is the max-

imum number of iterations. Algorithm 1 shows the

entire pseudo code of the MFO algorithm. The steps

of the MFO optimization starts by initializing the po-

sitions of moths. Each moth updates it’s position with

respect to a ﬂame based on a spiral equation. The

t and r parameters are linearly decreased over itera-

tions to emphasize exploitation. In each iteration, the

ﬂames list is updated and then sorted based on the

ﬁtness values of ﬂames. Consequently, the moths up-

date their positions with respect to their correspond-

ing ﬂames. To increase the chance of reaching to

the global best solution, the number of ﬂames is de-

creased with respect to the iteration number. Thus, a

given moth updates it’s position using only one of the

ﬂames.

Mi = S(Mi, F j) (1)

S(Mi, F j) = Di.e

.cos(2π) +F j (2)

Di = |Mi − F j| (3)

FlameNo = round(N − l ∗ (N − 1)/T ) (4)

2.2 Binary MFO (BMFO)

The original MFO algorithm was developed to solve

global optimization problems where the components

of a solution are real values. All what is required

is to check that the upper and lower bounds are not

exceeded during the initialization and update proce-

dures. In the binary optimization problems, the case

is different because the solutions have only binary el-

ements (i.e either "0" or "1"). This restriction should

be not violated while the moths change their positions

in the binary search space. For achieving this purpose,

some operators have to be integrated with MFO algo-

rithm to allow it optimize in the binary search space.

An Efﬁcient Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm using Chaotic Maps for Feature Selection in the Medical Applications

177

Algorithm 1: Pseudo-code of the MFO algorithm.

Input:Max_iteration, n (number of moths), d (num-

ber of dimensions)

Output:Approximated global solution

Initialize the position of moths

while l ≤ Max_iteration do

Update ﬂame no using Eq.4

OM = FitnessFunction(M);

if l == 1 then

F = sort(M);

OF = sort(OM);

else

F = sort(M

l−1

);

OF = sort(OM

l−1

,OM

);

end if

for i = 1: n do

for j = 1: d do

Update r and t;

Calculate D using Eq.3 with respect to the

corresponding moth;

Update M(i, j) using Eqs.1 and Eqs.2 with

respect to the corresponding moth;

end for

l = l + 1;

end while

The most common binary operator used for convert-

ing continuous optimizers into binary is the transfer

function (TF) (Mirjalili and Lewis, 2013). The main

reason for using TFs is that they are easy to imple-

ment without impacting the merit of the algorithm. In

this paper, the used TF is the sigmoid function which

was used originally in (Kennedy and Eberhart, 1997)

to generate the binary PSO (BPSO). In the MFO algo-

rithm, the ﬁrst term of Eq.2 represents the step vector

which is redeﬁned in Eq.5. The function of the sig-

moid is to determine a probability value in the range

[0,1] for each element of the solution. Eq.6 shows the

formula of the sigmoid function. Each moth updates

it’s position based on Eq.7 which takes the output of

Eq.6 as it’s input.

∆ M = Di . e

. cos(2π) (5)

T F(∆ M

) = 1/(1 + e

∆ M

) (6)

(t + 1) =

(

0, if rand < T F(∆ M

t+1

)

1, if rand > T F(∆ M

t+1

)

(7)

2.3 Feature Selection based on BMFO

The FS problem must be represented correctly in or-

der to facilitate the optimizer task in the feature space.

There are two key issues to achieve this: properly rep-

resenting the solution and evaluating it using a spe-

ciﬁc ﬁtness function. The solution to the FS problem

is represented as a binary vector where the length of

the vector is equal to the dimensions of the data set.

Thus, each element of the solution represents a fea-

ture that takes two values, either "1" if the feature

is selected or "0" if the feature is not selected. The

evaluation for the solution in the FS problem depends

on combining two main objectives of the FS problem

in one formula. These objectives are maximizing the

performance of the classiﬁer and simultaneously min-

imizing the number of dimensions in the dataset. Eq.8

formulates the FS problem where αγ

(D) is the er-

ror rate of the classiﬁcation produced by a classiﬁer,

|R| is the number of selected features in the reduced

dataset, and |C| is the number of features in the orig-

inal dataset, and α ∈ [0,1], β = (1 − α) are two pa-

rameters for representing the importance of classiﬁ-

cation performance and length of feature subset based

on recommendations (Mafarja and Mirjalili, 2018).

Fitness = αγ

(D) + β

|R|

|C|

(8)

3 THE PROPOSED APPROACH

In this section, the proposed chaotic BMFO

(CBMFO) approaches are presented.

3.1 Chaotic Maps

Chaotic maps are mathematical systems that describe

a dynamic deterministic process which has a high sen-

sitivity to initial conditions (dos Santos Coelho and

Mariani, 2008). Even though the process is deter-

ministic but the outcomes are unpredictable. Chaotic

maps have proved their effectiveness in improving the

performance of metaheuristic algorithms when they

are integrated with them for solving a speciﬁc opti-

mization problem. They have been applied to replace

the random components of the metaheuristic algo-

rithm to provide a higher convergence capability and

alleviate the local minima problem by getting closer

to the position of the optimal solution. In this paper,

the impact of chaotic maps are studied on MFO opti-

mizer in the FS search space. Four different chaotic

maps have been selected called circle, logistic, piece-

wise and tent as formulated in equations Eq.9, Eq.10,

ICPRAM 2020 - 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods

178

Eq.11, Eq.12, respectively. Fig 1 visually presents

these chaotic maps. The developed chaotic MFO vari-

ants are called CBMFO1, CBMFO2, CBMFO3 and

CBMFO4 respectively. In these variants, the chaotic

maps are used to initiate the positions of moths in-

stead of using the uniform random distribution. The

idea is to improve the initialization process of the

MFO and reduce the uncertainty of the optimizer.

This is done by replacing the initial random positions

of moths generated by uniform random distribution

with positions generated by chaotic maps.

Circle : x

+ 1 = mod(X

+ b − (a2π) sin(2π x

),1)

(9)

where: a = 0.5,b = 0.2.

Logistic : x

+ 1 = ax

(1 − x

) (10)

where: a = 4.

Piecewise : x

i+1











, if 0 ≤ x

< p

−p

0.5−p

, if p ≤ x

< 0.5

1−p−x

0.5−p

, if 0.5 ≤ x

< 1 − p

1−x

, if 1 − p ≤ x

< p

(11)

where: p = 0.4.

Tent : x

i+1

(

0.7

, if x

< 7

(1 − x

), if x

> 0.7

(12)

4 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

In this paper, 23 medical datasets were downloaded

from UCI (Asuncion and Newman, 2007), Keel

(Alcalá-Fdez et al., 2011) and Kaggle (Goldbloom

et al., 2017) data repositories to evaluate the proposed

wrapper approaches. Table 1 lists these datasets along

with their number of features, instances and classes.

All the datasets are characterized by balanced distri-

bution of their classes. To validate the proposed ap-

proaches, three well known metaheuristic algorithms

were used for comparison purposes: BGWO, BCS

and BBA. Their parameter settings are as follows: the

value of α parameter in GWO is in [2,0]. For BA,

the Qmin Frequency minimum value is 0, Qmax Fre-

quency maximum is 2, A Loudness value is 0.5 and r

Pulse rate is 0.5. For CS, the pa value is 0.25 and the

value of β parameter is 3/2.

All the experiments were executed on a personal

machine with AMD Athlon Dual-Core QL-60 CPU

Table 1: Description of the used datasets.

NO Dataset Name No features No instances No classes

1 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) 30 569 2

2 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Original) 9 699 2

3 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Prognostic) 33 194 2

4 Breast Cancer Coimbra 9 115 2

5 BreastEW 30 596 2

6 Diabetic Retinopathy Debrecen 19 1151 2

7 Dermatology 34 366 6

8 ILPD (Indian Liver Patient Dataset) 10 583 2

9 Lymphography 18 148 4

10 Parkinsons 22 194 2

11 Parkinson’s Disease Classiﬁcation 753 755 2

12 SPECT 22 267 2

13 Cleveland 13 297 5

14 HeartEW 13 270 2

15 Hepatitis 18 79 2

16 South African Heart (SA Heart ) 9 461 2

17 SPECTF Heart 43 266 2

18 Thyroid Disease (thyroid 0387) 21 7200 3

19 Heart 13 302 5

20 Pima-indians-diabetes 9 768 2

21 Leukemia 7129 72 2

22 Colon 2000 62 2

23 Prostate_GE 5966 102 2

at 1.90 GHz and memory of 2 GB running Win-

dows7 Ultimate 64 bit operating system. The opti-

mization algorithms are all implemented in Python

in the EvoloPy-FS framework (Khurma et al., 2020).

The maximum number of iterations and the popula-

tion size were set to 100 and 10 respectively. In this

work, the K-NN classiﬁer (where K = 5 (Mafarja and

Mirjalili, 2018)) is used to evaluate individuals in the

wrapper FS approach. Each dataset is randomly di-

vided in two parts; 80% for training and 20% for

testing. To obtain statistically signiﬁcant results, this

division was repeated 30 independent times. There-

fore, the ﬁnal statistical results were obtained over

30 independent runs. The α and β parameters in the

ﬁtness equation is set to 0.99 and 0.01, respectively

(Emary et al., 2016). The used evaluation measures

are ﬁtness values, classiﬁcation accuracy, number of

selected features and CPU time.

Inspecting the results in Table 2, it seems clearly

that the usage of chaotic operators have improved

the performance of the BMFO algorithm in terms of

the classiﬁcation accuracy. By comparing CBMFO1,

CBMFO2, CBMFO3 and CBMFO4 it appears that

the CBMFO2 and CBMFO4 achieved promising re-

sults. Based on the ranking results, the Tent-based

CBMFO4 achieved the highest classiﬁcation perfor-

mance in ﬁve out of 23 datasets then Logistic-based

CBMFO2 which which was superior across four

datasets. On the other hand, Circle-based CBMFO1

and Piecewise-based CBMFO3 outperformed other

algorithms only across two datasets. By combining

all the chaotic variants of the BMFO algorithm and

comparing their results with the standard BMFO algo-

rithm, it can be seen that the BMFO chaotic variants

achieved an improvement over the standard BMFO

equals 70%. Moreover, the standard BMFO was

not better than any of the chaotic approaches on any

An Efﬁcient Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm using Chaotic Maps for Feature Selection in the Medical Applications

179

Figure 1: Visualized chaotic maps.

Table 2: Average Classiﬁcation Accuracy from 30 Runs for All Approaches.

Dataset Name BMFO CBMFO1 CBMFO2 CBMFO3 CBMFO4 BGWO BCS BBA

1 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) 0.909 0.906 0.909 0.907 0.910 0.901 0.890 0.870

2 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Original) 0.963 0.970 0.955 0.967 0.966 0.871 0.812 0.698

3 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Prognostic) 0.583 0.588 0.600 0.596 0.575 0.570 0.533 0.500

4 Breast Cancer Coimbra 0.907 0.908 0.893 0.900 0.873 0.760 0.648 0.561

5 BreastEW 0.932 0.923 0.954 0.942 0.938 0.835 0.794 0.828

6 Diabetic Retinopathy Debrecen 0.542 0.538 0.551 0.536 0.548 0.527 0.500 0.500

7 Dermatology 0.820 0.787 0.813 0.822 0.804 0.829 0.833 0.753

8 ILPD (Indian Liver Patient Dataset) 0.714 0.714 0.714 0.714 0.714 0.742 0.733 0.661

9 Lymphography 0.772 0.744 0.761 0.800 0.750 0.723 0.691 0.612

10 Parkinsons 0.754 0.750 0.754 0.754 0.750 0.667 0.719 0.676

11 Parkinson

s Disease Classiﬁcation 0.811 0.809 0.811 0.798 0.816 0.789 0.763 0.671

12 SPECT 0.658 0.652 0.659 0.642 0.642 0.591 0.590 0.502

13 Cleveland 0.536 0.533 0.528 0.533 0.536 0.508 0.613 0.529

14 HeartEW 0.942 0.936 0.930 0.936 0.949 0.870 0.855 0.832

15 Hepatitis 0.750 0.750 0.750 0.750 0.750 0.673 0.641 0.561

16 South African Heart (SA Heart ) 0.684 0.683 0.693 0.697 0.684 0.630 0.616 0.593

17 SPECTF Heart 0.700 0.682 0.709 0.688 0.700 0.673 0.743 0.618

18 Thyroid Disease (thyroid0387) 0.981 0.980 0.981 0.981 0.981 0.943 0.934 0.902

19 Heart 0.752 0.767 0.767 0.758 0.776 0.727 0.724 0.719

20 Pima-indians-diabetes 0.807 0.807 0.807 0.807 0.807 0.813 0.800 0.790

21 Leukemia 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.987 0.950 0.885

22 Colon 0.656 0.644 0.667 0.656 0.667 0.630 0.603 0.620

23 Prostate_GE 0.500 0.501 0.511 0.503 0.519 0.503 0.504 0.500

Ranking (W|T |L ) 0|4|19 2|2|19 4|5|14 2|4|17 5|4|14 2|0|21 3|0|20 0|0|23

Table 3: Average Fitness Values from 30 Runs for All Approaches.

Dataset Name BMFO CBMFO1 CBMFO2 CBMFO3 CBMFO4 BGWO BCS BBA

1 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) 0.095 0.098 0.095 0.096 0.094 0.102 0.112 0.107

2 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Original) 0.043 0.036 0.051 0.040 0.041 0.130 0.188 0.190

3 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Prognostic) 0.415 0.411 0.399 0.403 0.424 0.433 0.468 0.499

4 Breast Cancer Coimbra 0.097 0.096 0.110 0.103 0.130 0.240 0.350 0.367

5 BreastEW 0.072 0.081 0.051 0.062 0.067 0.163 0.204 0.128

6 Diabetic Retinopathy Debrecen 0.457 0.462 0.448 0.464 0.452 0.474 0.498 0.495

7 Dermatology 0.184 0.216 0.190 0.181 0.199 0.172 0.168 0.180

8 ILPD (Indian Liver Patient Dataset) 0.290 0.290 0.290 0.290 0.290 0.263 0.271 0.321

9 Lymphography 0.231 0.258 0.242 0.204 0.253 0.209 0.222 0.220

10 Parkinsons 0.248 0.252 0.248 0.248 0.252 0.332 0.280 0.273

11 Parkinson

s Disease Classiﬁcation 0.192 0.194 0.192 0.203 0.187 0.223 0.247 0.267

12 SPECT 0.344 0.351 0.343 0.359 0.359 0.411 0.411 0.417

13 Cleveland 0.462 0.465 0.470 0.464 0.462 0.489 0.386 0.427

14 HeartEW 0.063 0.068 0.075 0.069 0.057 0.082 0.080 0.079

15 Hepatitis 0.253 0.252 0.252 0.253 0.252 0.329 0.359 0.364

16 South African Heart (SA Heart) 0.317 0.318 0.308 0.304 0.316 0.371 0.384 0.367

17 SPECTF Heart 0.302 0.319 0.293 0.314 0.302 0.326 0.257 0.340

18 Thyroid Disease (thyroid 0387) 0.019 0.020 0.019 0.019 0.019 0.059 0.066 0.048

19 Heart 0.251 0.236 0.236 0.245 0.227 0.273 0.276 0.264

20 Pima-indians-diabetes 0.200 0.200 0.200 0.200 0.200 0.195 0.206 0.199

21 Leukemia 0.005 0.005 0.005 0.005 0.005 0.033 0.066 0.042

22 Colon 0.344 0.356 0.333 0.344 0.333 0.352 0.377 0.329

23 Prostate_GE 0.450 0.499 0.489 0.498 0.481 0.497 0.496 0.500

Ranking (W|T |L ) 1|3|19 2|2|19 4|4|15 2|3|18 4|3|16 2|0|21 3|0|20 1|0|22

dataset. By comparing all BMFO-based approaches

with other metaheuristic wrapper approaches, the

BMFO approach was superior in 78% of the data

sets. The improvement in the classiﬁcation results of

the CBMFO can be explained that the chaotic opera-

tors have effectively improved the initialization pro-

cedure by replacing the uniform random distribution

with chaotic functions that have a greater sensitivity

to initial conditions. This led to a greater exploration

for the search space and better alleviating for the lo-

cal minima problem. Furthermore, the optimizer was

able to achieve a better trade-off between the two con-

ﬂicting milestones: exploration and exploitation. This

was realized by an improvement in the convergence

behaviour of the MFO in the binary feature space.

The overall performance of the proposed ap-

proaches can be better realized when analyzing the

ﬁtness values results that combine both classiﬁcation

accuracy and the selection ratio. From the results in

Table 3, it can be seen that CBMFO approaches got

better results than other methods in twelve out of 23

datasets that are close to half of the datasets.

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Table 4: Average Number of Selected Features from 30 Runs for All Approaches.

Dataset Name BMFO CBMFO1 CBMFO2 CBMFO3 CBMFO4 BGWO BCS BBA

1 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) 14.233 14.867 14.233 13.500 14.500 14.010 16.177 14.010

2 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Original) 5.500 5.800 5.967 5.867 5.867 7.533 7.000 6.467

3 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Prognostic) 15.967 15.867 16.033 16.100 16.367 18.233 16.400 15.400

4 Breast Cancer Coimbra 3.667 3.367 3.633 3.467 3.833 6.077 6.844 4.810

5 BreastEW 13.833 14.100 14.900 14.300 14.433 17.338 13.505 11.505

6 Diabetic Retinopathy Debrecen 7.567 7.667 7.267 7.467 7.533 10.563 8.290 6.763

7 Dermatology 18.300 17.733 17.567 18.233 18.200 21.000 18.699 14.401

8 ILPD (Indian Liver Patient Dataset) 4.000 4.000 4.000 4.000 4.000 6.567 7.333 5.300

9 Lymphography 9.433 9.733 10.167 10.133 9.233 10.230 9.300 7.330

10 Parkinsons 10.633 9.700 10.733 10.167 10.000 11.258 10.687 7.854

11 Parkinson

s Disease Classiﬁcation 373.733 345.967 346.600 225.833 347.000 421.211 383.508 363.711

12 SPECT 11.433 12.167 11.700 11.500 11.367 13.106 10.779 8.210

13 Cleveland 6.200 6.400 5.967 5.633 5.833 8.900 7.632 6.346

14 HeartEW 7.400 7.067 7.633 7.567 7.400 6.700 5.867 4.700

15 Hepatitis 9.100 8.167 8.667 9.400 8.233 13.496 11.123 9.511

16 South African Heart (SA Heart) 3.700 3.467 3.400 3.067 3.333 6.333 4.221 5.100

17 SPECTF Heart 20.600 19.000 20.400 20.567 20.033 26.355 18.941 14.891

18 Thyroid Disease (thyroid 0387) 8.523 8.022 8.100 9.1061 8.087 11.490 9.990 6.990

19 Heart 6.367 6.100 6.200 6.167 6.033 8.600 7.367 6.067

20 Pima-indians-diabetes 6.500 6.333 6.400 6.367 6.700 6.946 8.059 6.067

21 Leukemia 3562.692 3536.442 3822.169 3671.113 3652.963 4052.986 3944.353 3249.220

22 Colon 994.157 989.529 1000.569 998.457 992.417 1147.978 1101.712 933.378

23 Prostate_GE 2988.113 2960.663 2998.510 2991.336 2958.447 2994.691 2986.400 2985.631

Ranking (W|T |L ) 1|1|21 2|1|20 0|1|22 4|1|18 2|1|20 0|0|23 0|0|23 13|0|10

Table 5: Average Computational Time from 30 Runs for All Approaches.

Dataset Name BMFO CBMFO1 CBMFO2 CBMFO3 CBMFO4 BGWO BCS BBA

1 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) 123.147 159.580 161.999 162.096 114.157 98.772 68.757 52.269

2 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Original) 121.202 108.772 122.246 117.109 112.431 83.596 52.370 45.798

3 Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Prognostic) 85.989 87.877 85.364 95.580 55.849 49.632 27.458 15.896

4 Breast Cancer Coimbra 62.392 43.926 39.175 46.251 64.872 31.715 25.790 18.896

5 BreastEW 165.641 161.151 150.501 163.598 153.825 103.559 45.789 46.796

6 Diabetic Retinopathy Debrecen 268.268 291.092 241.833 280.222 271.357 211.789 169.524 144.891

7 Dermatology 86.433 70.400 66.805 111.632 107.998 80.632 53.969 41.598

8 ILPD (Indian Liver Patient Dataset) 103.550 76.286 58.309 80.301 59.457 84.633 62.753 55.789

9 Lymphography 68.208 40.978 47.599 53.355 41.869 65.890 34.529 32.741

10 Parkinsons 82.594 65.517 50.102 50.137 47.086 81.522 43.960 41.875

11 Parkinson

s Disease Classiﬁcation 956.432 734.329 768.159 946.304 914.159 884.631 436.590 420.637

12 SPECT 99.688 57.469 68.748 74.292 58.382 75.457 28.693 27.551

13 Cleveland 55.173 66.702 54.722 54.976 75.738 61.896 22.963 31.893

14 HeartEW 87.035 85.627 78.856 83.678 83.966 88.460 33.569 37.560

15 Hepatitis 34.603 48.176 36.794 38.536 50.800 39.772 26.896 13.598

16 South African Heart (SA Heart ) 82.592 76.325 86.452 88.409 81.023 95.569 37.510 39.632

17 SPECTF Heart 93.671 97.836 84.029 91.410 104.362 91.559 38.569 49.110

18 Thyroid Disease (thyroid 0387) 5021.887 4335.116 4896.563 5781.663 4891.263 3789.224 1598.789 1269.633

19 Heart 56.492 51.446 67.667 73.856 59.964 71.583 35.094 43.669

20 Pima-indians-diabetes 179.240 118.969 137.138 166.997 141.529 145.225 33.789 31.115

21 Leukemia 1416.448 1458.963 1215.662 1589.445 1460.781 1490.236 849.740 800.559

22 Colon 583.960 5689.021 561.896 5981.024 5713.693 371.777 220.631 197.855

23 Prostate_GE 1257.102 1236.896 1234.112 1456.932 1008.963 1149.115 988.763 950.111

Ranking (W|T |L ) 0|0|23 0|0|23 0|0|23 0|0|23 0|0|23 0|0|23 5|0|18 18|0|5

According to Table 4, it seems clear that the

BBA algorithm outperformed other wrapper ap-

proaches across 57% of datasets. By comparing the

CBMFO approaches to each other in terms of selec-

tion ratio, the Circle-based CBMFO1 outperformed

other chaotic approaches across 52% of datasets and

then came the Piecewise-based CBMFO3 and Tent-

based CBMFO4 that outperformed other chaotic vari-

ants evenly over 17% of datasets and ﬁnally came

Logistic-based CBMFO2 that outperformed other

chaotic variants on 1% of datasets.

By looking at Table 5, it seems clear from the

ranking results that the BBA algorithm outperformed

other wrapper approaches across 78% of datasets

while the BCS algorithm outperformed others across

22% of the datasets. It is seen that the BMFO

approaches were not able to outperform these ap-

proaches on any of the datasets. By comparing the

CBMFO approaches to each other in terms of running

time, the Logistic-based CBMFO2 and Circle-based

CBMFO1 achieved better results compared with other

chaotic variants. The CBMFO2 consumed the short-

est optimization time to ﬁnd the near optimal fea-

ture subset across ten datasets and the CBMFO1 con-

sumed the shortest optimization time across eight

datasets. However, the BBA algorithm had much su-

perior performance in general. On the other hand,

CBMFO4 based on Tent map achieved the shortest

CPU time for optimization across four datasets. For

the CBMFO3, it is clear that this approach didn’t out-

perform any other approaches in terms of running

time.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper, multiple binary versions based on MFO

algorithm have been proposed to address the FS prob-

lem. The chaotic maps have been adopted to enhance

the BMFO performance in the feature space. Speciﬁ-

cally, the chaotic maps were used to enhance the ini-

tialization of moths and promote the convergence be-

haviour of the MFO algorithm. Therefore, the MFO

can alleviate stagnation in local minima and reach to

An Efﬁcient Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm using Chaotic Maps for Feature Selection in the Medical Applications

181

a closer place near the global optima. To evaluate the

proposed approaches, 23 medical datasets were used

from well regarded data repositories including UCI,

Keel and Kaggle. The comparative results showed

that the chaotic operators have enhanced the perfor-

mance of the standard BMFO when used to optimize

the feature search space. For the future, the research

line of metaheuristic based wrapper methods can be

continued by proposing new modiﬁcation strategies

and adopting other metahueristic algorithms to exam-

ine feature space.

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