We propose a sequential forward feature selection method to find a subset of features that are most relevant to the classification
task. Our approach uses novel estimation of the conditional mutual information between candidate feature and classes, given
a subset of already selected features which is utilized as a classifier independent criterion for evaluation of feature subsets.
The proposed mMIFS-U algorithm is applied to text classification problem and compared with MIFS method and MIFS-U method proposed
by Battiti and Kwak and Choi, respectively. Our feature selection algorithm outperforms MIFS method and MIFS-U in experiments
on high dimensional Reuters textual data.
Keywords Pattern classification - feature selection - conditional mutual information - text categorization