A Global Unsupervised Feature Selection Method Based on Fuzzy Mutual Information

With the rapid growth of data, feature selection has become essential for improving machine learning performance. However, most existing unsupervised feature selection methods rely on greedy strategies, which often lead to suboptimal solutions. Moreover, traditional information–theoretic approaches are primarily designed for discrete data and require discretization when applied to continuous data, potentially causing information loss. To address these issues, this paper proposes a global unsupervised feature selection method based on fuzzy mutual information (UFS-FMI). The proposed method integrates fuzzy set theory with information measures to quantify feature relevance and redundancy, and formulates a fractional optimization model. A combination of projection neural networks and kWTA neural networks is employed to achieve global optimization. Experimental results on nine UCI benchmark datasets demonstrate that UFS-FMI consistently outperforms several representative methods in terms of classification accuracy, clustering accuracy, and normalized mutual information (NMI). In particular, on datasets such as Movement_libras, Ionosphere, and Control, the proposed method achieves significantly improved classification performance, confirming its effectiveness and robustness.