  Filter or screening methods are often used as a preprocessing step for
reducing the number of variables used by a learning algorithm in obtaining a
classification or regression model. While there are many such filter methods,
there is a need for an objective evaluation of these methods. Such an
evaluation is needed to compare them with each other and also to answer whether
they are at all useful, or a learning algorithm could do a better job without
them. For this purpose, many popular screening methods are partnered in this
paper with three regression learners and five classification learners and
evaluated on ten real datasets to obtain accuracy criteria such as R-square and
area under the ROC curve (AUC). The obtained results are compared through curve
plots and comparison tables in order to find out whether screening methods help
improve the performance of learning algorithms and how they fare with each
other. Our findings revealed that the screening methods were useful in
improving the prediction of the best learner on two regression and two
classification datasets out of the ten datasets evaluated.
