Pattern Recognition, 4th Edition

Chapter 5. Feature Selection

5.1. Introduction

In all previous chapters, we considered the features that should be available prior to the design of the classifier. The goal of this chapter is to study methodologies related to the selection of these variables. As we pointed out very early in the book, a major problem associated with pattern recognition is the so-called curse of dimensionality (Section 2.5.6). The number of features at the disposal of the designer of a classification system is usually very large. As we will see in Chapter 7, this number can easily reach the order of a few dozens or even hundreds.

There is more than one reason to reduce the number of features to a sufficient minimum. Computational complexity is the obvious one. ...