Improving Supervised Learning by Feature Decomposition

The results achieved in the empirical comparison testing with well-known learning algorithms indicate the superiority of the feature decomposition approach in learning tasks that contains high number of features and moderate numbers of tuples.

Abstract

This paper presents the Feature Decomposition Approach for improving supervised learning tasks. While in Feature Selection the aim is to identify a representative set of features from which to construct a classification model, in Feature Decomposition, the goal is to decompose the original set of features into several subsets. A classification model is built for each subset, and then all generated models are combined. This paper presents theoretical and practical aspects of the Feature Decomposition Approach. A greedy procedure, called DOT (Decomposed Oblivious Trees), is developed to decompose the input features set into subsets and to build a classification model for each subset separately. The results achieved in the empirical comparison testing with well-known learning algorithms (like C4.5) indicate the superiority of the feature decomposition approach in learning tasks that contains high number of features and moderate numbers of tuples.