Optimal column subset selection for image classification by genetic algorithms

Many problems in operations research can be solved by combinatorial optimization. Fixed-length subset selection is a family of combinatorial optimization problems that involve selection of a set of unique objects from a larger superset. Feature selection, p-median problem, and column subset selection problem are three examples of hard problems that involve search for fixed-length subsets. Due to their high complexity, exact algorithms are often infeasible to solve real-world instances of these problems and approximate methods based on various heuristic and metaheuristic (e.g. nature-inspired) approaches are often employed. Selecting column subsets from massive data matrices is an important technique useful for construction of compressed representations and low rank approximations of high-dimensional data. Search for an optimal subset of exactly k columns of a matrix, $$A^{m\times n}$$ A m × n , $$k