Heuristics Tools Based on Mutual Information for Variable
Ranking
Description
A computational toolbox of heuristics approaches for performing variable ranking and feature selection based on mutual information well adapted for multivariate system epidemiology datasets. The core function is a general implementation of the minimum redundancy maximum relevance model. R. Battiti (1994) . Continuous variables are discretized using a large choice of rule. Variables ranking can be learned with a sequential forward/backward search algorithm. The two main problems that can be addressed by this package is the selection of the most representative variable within a group of variables of interest (i.e. dimension reduction) and variable ranking with respect to a set of features of interest.