General Set Covering for Feature Selection in Data Mining

Abstract

Set covering has widely been accepted as a staple tool for feature selection in data mining. We present a generalized version of this classical combinatorial optimization model to make it better suited for the purpose and propose a surrogate relaxation-based procedure for its meta-heuristic solution. Mathematically and also numerically with experiments on 25 set covering instances, we demonstrate the utility of the proposed model and the proposed solution method.