Abstract
Feature selection techniques are considered one of the most important preprocessing steps, which has the most significant influence on the performance of data analysis and decision making. These FS techniques aim to achieve several objectives (such as reducing classification error and minimizing the number of features) at the same time to increase the classification rate. FS based on Metaheuristic (MH) is considered one of the most promising techniques to improve the classification process. This paper presents a modified method of the Slime mould algorithm depending on the Marine Predators Algorithm (MPA) operators as a local search strategy, which leads to increasing the convergence rate of the developed method, named SMAMPA and avoiding the attraction to local optima. The efficiency of SMAMPA is evaluated using twenty datasets and compared its results with the state-of-the-art FS methods. In addition, the applicability of SMAMPA to work with real-world problems is evaluated by using it as a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) model. The obtained results show the high ability of the developed SMAMPA method to reduce the dimension of the tested datasets by increasing the prediction rate. In addition, it provides results better than other FS techniques in terms of performance metrics.