Feature and Instance Joint Selection: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Abstract: Feature selection and instance selection are two important techniques of data processing. However, such selections have mostly been studied separately, while existing work towards the joint selection conducts feature/instance selection coarsely; thus neglecting the latent fine-grained interaction between feature space and instance space. To address this challenge, we propose a reinforcement learning solution to accomplish the joint selection task and simultaneously capture the interaction between the selection of each feature and each instance. In particular, a sequential-scanning mechanism is designed as action strategy of agents, and a collaborative-changing environment is used to enhance agent collaboration. In addition, an interactive paradigm introduces prior selection knowledge to help agents for more efficient exploration. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets have demonstrated improved performances.