Feature selection is an important task in machine learning, reducing dimensionality of learning problems by selecting few relevant features without losing too much information. Focusing on smaller sets of features, we can learn simpler models from data that are easier to understand and to apply. In fact, simpler models are more robust to input noise and outliers, often leading to better prediction performance than the models trained in higher dimensions with all features. We implement several feature selection algorithms in an extension of RapidMiner, that scale well with the number of features compared to the existing feature selection operators in RapidMiner.
A technical report describing the feature selection extension can be found in our tech report list.