FSelector: a Ruby gem for feature selection

Abstract

Summary: The FSelector package contains a comprehensive list of feature selection algorithms for supporting bioinformatics and machine learning research. FSelector primarily collects and implements the filter type of feature selection techniques, which are computationally efficient for mining large datasets. In particular, FSelector allows ensemble feature selection that takes advantage of multiple feature selection algorithms to yield more robust results. FSelector also provides many useful auxiliary tools, including normalization, discretization and missing data imputation.

Availability: FSelector, written in the Ruby programming language, is free and open-source software that runs on all Ruby supporting platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. FSelector is available from https://rubygems.org/gems/fselector and can be installed like a breeze via the command gem install fselector. The source code is available (https://github.com/need47/fselector) and is fully documented (http://rubydoc.info/gems/fselector/frames).

Fig. 1.

Example of feature selection by using information gain as the feature selection algorithm. Note that line contents following ‘#’ are comments in the Ruby programming language