The paper argues that many newly proposed unsupervised feature selection methods are evaluated only against other methods without a proper baseline. Using random feature selection as a baseline, the authors demonstrate that several state‑of‑the‑art methods are actually outperformed in both performance and efficiency. They call for the inclusion of random selection as a baseline and for the development of better evaluation metrics to ensure realistic assessment of future methods.
arXiv:2608.12057v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feature selection is one of the most important and fundamental tasks in data mining, tackled by a family of methods with an established set of eval...
arXiv:2608. 12057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Feature selection is one of the most important and fundamental tasks in data mining, tackled by a family of methods with an established set of evaluation techniques to measure the quality of a specific method.
arXiv:2607. 24145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Feature selection aims to identify the most informative and relevant features for a given dataset, either in terms of capturing the underlying data structure and distribution better, or with respect to the performance on a downstream task.
The paper introduces LIDFS, an unsupervised feature selection technique that uses Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID) to rank features based on their local discriminability. By treating each feature as a point and estimating its LID via maximum likelihood from distances to its k nearest neighboring features, LIDFS assigns higher importance to features with lower LID and refines the ranking to remove locally redundant features. Experiments on 23 high‑dimensional datasets show that LIDFS outperforms both classic and state‑of‑the‑art methods in supervised and clustering evaluations while running faster than its closest competitor.
arXiv:2511. 20851v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature selection remains difficult in modern high-dimensional settings, and established methods such as Boruta and Recursive Feature Elimination are either computationally costly or lack a statistically justified stopping criterion for their importance scores.
arXiv:2606. 07068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Since 1990 many feature selection methods have been proposed across heterogeneous applications.
arXiv:2609.24126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Black-box machine learning models increasingly deliver strong predictions, but extracting useful information from them, such as a set of important fe...
arXiv:2508. 14268v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature selection and importance estimation in a model-agnostic setting is an ongoing challenge of significant interest.
arXiv:2412.10128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feature selection is crucial for pinpointing relevant features in high-dimensional datasets, mitigating the 'curse of dimensionality,' and enhancin...
The paper refactors and expands the scikit-rebate Python package, adding new Relief‑Based Algorithm (RBA) variants such as SWRF*, mu‑Relief, and five novel methods that use alternative neighbor selection and feature scoring strategies. Benchmarking across diverse genomic simulations shows that most RBAs, except mu‑Relief, effectively detect 2‑way interactions in noisy data, with far‑scoring variants like MultiSWRFDB* excelling at interaction detection but being less sensitive to main effects. The refactored package achieves 10‑ to 35‑fold runtime reductions, and the new RBAs maintain strong performance for both main effects and 2‑way epistatic interactions, preserving predictive signals for downstream modeling.
arXiv:2608.28806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) disentangle model activations into interpretable features and are widely used for steering large language models. Most exist...
SelectArena is a new benchmark for feature selection on real-world tabular data, evaluating 15 popular methods across 71 curated datasets for both classification and regression tasks. The study uses standardized protocols and modern foundation models, revealing trade-offs among predictive performance, runtime, stability, and validity. Tree-based methods (CART, RFImportance) and the F-Test emerge as Pareto-optimal choices, while search-based methods perform poorly in speed and stability.