AE-MCDM: an autoencoder-based multi-criteria decision-making approach for unsupervised feature selection

AE-MCDM: an autoencoder-based multi-criteria decision-making approach for unsupervised feature selection

연구 분야: Verification

학회: The Journal of Supercomputing

Feature selection is a fundamental technique for reducing the dimensionality of high-dimensional data by identifying the most relevant features while discarding redundant or irrelevant ones. In unsupervised settings, where labeled data are unavailable and labeling is costly, effective feature selection becomes even more challenging. This paper proposes AE-MCDM, a novel unsupervised feature selection method that integrates autoencoder-based feature extraction with multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM). The autoencoder captures high-level feature representations, and the connection weights between input features and hidden neurons reflect feature importance. These weights are then processed using MCDM to rank and select the most informative features. Unlike conventional unsupervised feature selection methods, AE-MCDM leverages deep representation learning to enhance feature evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to combine autoencoders with MCDM for feature selection. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that AE-MCDM outperforms existing methods in terms of clustering performance, measured by metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and normalized mutual information (NMI), while also achieving competitive computational efficiency.