The problem of feature selection is fundamental in various tasks like classification, data mining, image processing, conceptual learning, and so on. Feature selection is usually used to achieve the same or better performance using fewer features. It can be considered as an optimization problem and aims to find an optimal feature subset from the available features according to a certain criterion function. Clonal selection algorithm is a good choice in solving an optimization problem. It introduces the mechanisms of affinity maturation, clone, and memorization. Rapid convergence and good global searching capability characterize the performance of the corresponding operations. In this study, the property of rapid convergence to global optimum of clonal selection algorithm is made use of to speed up the searching of the most appropriate feature subset among a huge number of possible feature combinations. Compared with the traditional genetic algorithm-based feature selection, the clonal selection algorithm-based feature selection can find a better feature subset for classification. Experimental results on datasets from UCI learning repository, 16 types of Brodatz textures classification, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images classification demonstrated the effectiveness and good performance of the method in applications.
