The Effect of Clustering in Filter Method Results Applied in Medical Datasets

For a deeper and richer analytic processing of medical datasets, feature selection aims to eliminate redundant and irrelevant features from the data. While filter has been touted as one of the simplest methods for feature selection, its applications have generally failed to identify and deal with embedded similarities among features. In this research, a hybrid approach for feature selection based on combining the filter method with the hierarchical agglomerative clustering method is proposed to eliminate irrelevant and redundant features in four medical datasets. A formal evaluation of the proposed approach unveils major improvements in the classification accuracy when results are compared to those obtained via only the applications of the filter methods and/or more classical-based feature selection approaches.