Financial Information Systems

The Neighborhood Rough Set (NRST) method is a valuable approach for selecting a subset of features from a complete dataset, enabling us to preserve the essential information that the entire feature set provides. In financial datasets, which often contain high-dimensional input features, effective feature selection techniques are crucial to identify the features that yield the most predictable results. In this work, we use neighborhood concepts to discover data dependencies and reduce the number of features in a financial dataset based solely on the data itself, without relying on additional information. This process also includes removing extra features. To facilitate a simple algorithm, we use the properties of neighbourhood rough sets to formulate a Binary Integer Linear Programming (BILP) model. Optimal solutions to these problems are obtained using genetic algorithms. Our approach allows for feature reduction from minimum to maximum cardinality. We demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method compared to other techniques through various tables showing the results on several benchmark datasets characterized by unbalanced class distributions. The financial dataset used in the present study is taken from the UCI Machine Learning Repository.