Feature Selection with Binary Symbiotic Organisms Search Algorithm for Email Spam Detection

One method to increase classifier accuracy is using Feature Selection (FS). The main idea in the FS is reducing complexity, eliminating irrelevant information, and deleting a subset of input features that either have little information or have no information for prediction. In this paper, three efficient binary methods based on the Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) algorithm were presented for solving the FS problem. In the first and second methods, several S_shaped and V_shaped transfer functions were used for the binarization of the SOS, respectively. These methods were called BSOSS and BSOSV. In the third method, two new operators called Binary Mutualism Phase (BMP) and Binary Commensalism Phase (BCP) were presented for binarization of the SOS, named Efficient Binary SOS (EBSOS). The proposed methods were run on 18 standard UCI datasets and compared to the base and important meta-heuristic algorithms. The test results showed that the EBSOS method has the best performance among the three proposed methods for the binarization of the SOS. Finally, the EBSOS method was compared to the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Binary Bat Algorithm (BBA), Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) Algorithm, Binary Flower Pollination Algorithm (BFPA), Binary Grey Wolf Optimizer (BGWO) Algorithm, Binary Dragonfly Algorithm (BDA), and Binary Chaotic Crow Search Algorithm (BCCSA). In addition, the EBSOS method was executed on the spam email dataset with the KNN, NB, SVM, and MLP classifiers. The results showed that the EBSOS method has better performance compared to other methods in terms of feature count and accuracy criteria. Furthermore, it was practically evaluated on spam email detection in particular.