RT Journal Article T1 Automatic frequency-based feature selection using discrete weighted evolution strategy A1 Nematzadeh, Hossein A1 García-Nieto, José Manuel A1 Navas-Delgado, Ismael A1 Aldana-Montes, José Francisco K1 Análisis de datos AB High dimensional datasets usually suffer from curse of dimensionality which may increase the classification time and decrease the classification accuracy beyond a certain dimensionality. Thus, feature selection is used to discard redundant features for improving classification. Nonetheless, there is not a single feature selection method which could deal with all datasets. Thus, this paper proposes an automatic hybrid feature selection incorporating both filter and wrapper methods called Extended Mutual Congestion-Discrete Weighted Evolution Strategy (EMC-DWES). First, Extended Mutual Congestion (EMC) is proposed as a frequency-based filter ranker to discard irrelevant and redundant features using intrinsic statistics of features. Second, Discrete Weighted Evolution Strategy (DWES) is applied on the remaining features selected by EMC to perform the final automatic feature selection within a wrapper method. DWES clusters the features and applies mutation both to select the most relevant feature in each cluster at a time and to avoid selecting redundant features simultaneously through assigning greater weights to most informative clusters. The performance of EMC-DWES (in maximizing classification accuracy and minimizing the selected subset length) is investigated using benchmark high dimensional medical datasets including Covid-19. Likewise, the superiority of EMC-DWES in comparison with state-of-the-art is also evaluated in all datasets. The implementation of EMC-DWES is available on https://github.com/KhaosResearch/EMC-DWES. PB Elsevier YR 2022 FD 2022-10-10 LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/26301 UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/26301 LA eng NO Nematzadeh, H., García-Nieto, J., Navas-Delgado, I., & Aldana-Montes, J. F. (2022). Automatic frequency-based feature selection using discrete weighted evolution strategy. Applied Soft Computing, 130, 109699. NO This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation via Grant PID2020-112540RB-C41 (AEI/FEDER, UE) and Andalusian PAIDI program with grant P18-RT-2799. It is also granted by the LifeWatch-ERIC initiative ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIODIVERSITY CLIMATE CHANGE LAB (EnBiC2Lab). Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA. DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga RD 19 ene 2026