  Ensemble learning that can be used to combine the predictions from multiple
learners has been widely applied in pattern recognition, and has been reported
to be more robust and accurate than the individual learners. This ensemble
logic has recently also been more applied in feature selection. There are
basically two strategies for ensemble feature selection, namely data
perturbation and function perturbation. Data perturbation performs feature
selection on data subsets sampled from the original dataset and then selects
the features consistently ranked highly across those data subsets. This has
been found to improve both the stability of the selector and the prediction
accuracy for a classifier. Function perturbation frees the user from having to
decide on the most appropriate selector for any given situation and works by
aggregating multiple selectors. This has been found to maintain or improve
classification performance. Here we propose a framework, EFSIS, combining these
two strategies. Empirical results indicate that EFSIS gives both high
prediction accuracy and stability.
