Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
DOI 10.1007/s00521-017-2988-6
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Feature selection via a novel chaotic crow search algorithm
Gehad Ismail Sayed1 · Aboul Ella Hassanien1 · Ahmad Taher Azar2,3
Received: 15 November 2016 / Accepted: 27 March 2017 / Published online: 25 April 2017
© The Natural Computing Applications Forum 2017
Abstract Crow search algorithm (CSA) is a new natural
inspired algorithm proposed by Askarzadeh in 2016. The
main inspiration of CSA came from crow search mecha-
nism for hiding their food. Like most of the optimization
algorithms, CSA suffers from low convergence rate and
entrapment in local optima. In this paper, a novel meta-
heuristic optimizer, namely chaotic crow search algorithm
(CCSA), is proposed to overcome these problems. The
proposed CCSA is applied to optimize feature selection
problem for 20 benchmark datasets. Ten chaotic maps are
employed during the optimization process of CSA. The per-
formance of CCSA is compared with other well-known and
recent optimization algorithms. Experimental results reveal
the capability of CCSA to find an optimal feature subset
which maximizes the classification performance and mini-
mizes the number of selected features. Moreover, the results
Scientific Research Group in Egypt http://www.egyptscience.net
 Gehad Ismail Sayed
gehad.ismail@egyptscience.net
Aboul Ella Hassanien
aboitcairo@gmail.com
Ahmad Taher Azar
ahmad.azar@fci.bu.edu.eg; ahmad t azar@ieee.org
1 Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University,
Cairo, Egypt
2 Faculty of Computers and Information, Benha University,
Banha, Egypt
3 Nanoelectronics Integrated Systems Center (NISC),
Nile University, Giza, Egypt
show that CCSA is superior compared to CSA and the
other algorithms. In addition, the experiments show that sine
chaotic map is the appropriate map to significantly boost the
performance of CSA.
Keywords Crow search algorithm · Feature selection ·
Optimization algorithm · Chaos theory
1 Introduction
Recently, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have a great attrac-
tion and proved their efficiency for solving optimization
problems. Some of these algorithms are genetic algorithm
(GA) [15], particle swarm optimization (PSO) [26], many
objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) [9], and
differential evolution (DE) [44]. Despite the different struc-
tures of EAs, they usually set a random population. Then,
they evaluate it through the iterations. EAs are similar in
dividing the search space into two main phases: exploitation
and exploration. In many cases, EAs get stuck in local min-
ima. This is due to improper balancing between exploitation
and exploration and the stochastic nature of EAs. Several
studies are presented in the literature to overcome these
problems and to improve the performance of EAs. Chaos is
one of the mathematical approaches recently employed to
boost the performance of EAs.
In the last decade, mathematics and system science
branch, namely chaos, has been developed. It has been
applied intensively in different sciences’s fields such as
synchronization [60], chaos control [57], different optimiza-
tion researches [45, 51], and so on. Chaos has three main
dynamic properties; (1) quasi stochastic property, (2) sen-
sitivity against initial conditions, and (3) ergodicity. The
chaos application in optimization research disciplines has
172
attracted a great attention in recent years. Chaotic opti-
mization algorithm (COA) is one of the chaos applications,
which makes a use of chaos sequence’s nature [29]. It has
been proved that replacing random variables with chaotic
variable can enhance the performance of COA [29]. Thus,
several studies combine chaos with other algorithms in order
to improve the performance of COA. Some of them are
chaotic ant swarm optimization (CASO) [5], chaotic genetic
algorithm (CGA) [1, 49], chaotic particle swarm (CPSO)
[20, 21, 50], chaotic pattern search (CPS) [54], chaotic sim-
ulated annealing algorithm (CSA) [33], chaotic differential
evolution algorithm (CDEA) [22], chaotic biogeography-
based optimization (CBBO) [39], chaotic krill herd algo-
rithm (CKHA) [47], and chaotic firefly algorithm (CFA)
[13]. These algorithms have been proposed and in literature
and applied on different domains.
Feature selection is considered as a preprocessing step in
machine learning. Selecting the most relevant feature sub-
set is one of the challenging tasks for complex or large
dataset. Discovering hidden patterns or valuable knowl-
edge in large scale data has become a pressing matter
of the moment [23]. Feature selection has been proven
to effectively remove irrelevant and redundant features. In
addition, it can improve the performance of classifiers,
reduce the computational cost, and reduce the required stor-
age [28]. In recent years, data became increasingly larger
in both a number of attributes/features and a number of
instances. Feature selection has been applied successfully in
many applications such as text categorization [52], genome
projects [4], customer relationship management [35], and
image retrieval [37]. Thus, nowadays, feature selection for
high-dimensional data becomes very necessary needed for
machine learning tasks.
Feature selection emerged as an effective medical clas-
sification and diagnostic support system. Microarray tech-
nology is one of the recent breakthroughs in experimental
molecular biology. This technology helps scientists in mon-
itoring the gene expression on a genomic scale. Such a
technology at the gene expression level can significantly
increase the possibility of cancer classification and diagno-
sis. However, many factors can degrade the outcome of the
analysis. One of these factors is in the huge number of genes
founded in the original data. Thus, determining the most dis-
criminatory genes is considered a critical task to improve the
speed and accuracy of prediction systems [16, 43]. Authors
in [43] present a hybrid forward selection algorithm for
cardiovascular disease diagnosis. The experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed approach finds smaller fea-
ture subsets with high diagnosis’s accuracy compared to
back elimination and forward inclusion algorithms.
Feature selection can have a great impact on the cluster-
ing performance, as selecting relevant features can improve
the learning quality and consume computational time and
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
memory. In addition, it can help in better data understanding
and interpretation. Several studies on applying feature selec-
tion before clustering are found in the literature [6, 53]. It
has been proven that clusters built by a subset of the salient
features are more practical and interpretable than clusters
built using all of the features, as some of these features
include noise. Moreover, feature selection plays an impor-
tant role in multi-label learning. Class label dependence in
multi-label learning is considered another aspect that can
be noisy and incomplete. Thus, the high dimensionality of
multi-labeled data not only increases computational costs
and the memory storage requirements for many learning
algorithms but also, in real applications, limits the usage of
these learning algorithms. Feature selection can be used to
improve the performance of multi-label ELM-RBF through
reducing the feature dimensionality while performing clus-
tering analysis [58]. Authors in [24] proposed multi-label
informed feature selection approach. They used label corre-
lations for selecting the most discriminating features across
multiple labels.
Feature selection algorithms are divided in two main cat-
egories, namely wrapper-based algorithms and filter-based
algorithms [27]. The wrapper-based algorithms depend on
using machine learning algorithms for their evaluation. On
the other hand, filter-based algorithms use statistical meth-
ods for selecting a feature subset. However, wrapper-based
algorithms obtain better results; they are computationally
expensive. Thus, an intelligent search algorithm is needed
to reduce the computational time [17]. Several studies have
been proposed to introduce feature selection algorithms
such as sequential backward selection (SBS) and sequential
forward selection (SFS). However, these algorithms suf-
fer from stacking in local optima and high computational
time. EAs using their search agents can search the feature
space adaptively to find the optimal solution. Some of these
algorithms are gradient descent algorithm [10], discrete par-
ticle swarm optimization (DPSO) [46], tabu search [56],
elephant herding optimization (EHO) [11], firefly algo-
rithm (FA) [12], harmony search (HS) [14], charged system
search (CSS) [25], bird swarm algorithm (BSA) [32], ani-
mal migration optimization (AMO) [30], teaching–learning-
based optimization (TLBO) [36], moth-flame optimization
(MFO) [55], and gray wolf optimizer (GWO) [34].
Although selecting the best feature subset has been sig-
nificantly improved, there is still a need to motivate to
push these presented work further. This work tries a novel
hybrid approach, where chaos embedded with CSA. The
main contribution of this paper is that a chaotic binary ver-
sion of CCSA is proposed to enhance the performance of
CSA. In this hybrid approach, the chaotic search method-
ology is adopted to select the optimal feature subset which
maximizes the classification accuracy and minimizes the
feature subset length. Ten one-dimensional chaotic maps are
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
adopted and replaced with random movement parameters of
CSA. In this study, CCSA is used as a feature selection algo-
rithm. The performance of the proposed approach is tested
on 20 benchmark datasets. In addition, the performance of
CCSA is compared with seven other meta-heuristic algorithms.
The organization of this paper is as follows. A brief
overview of the basic CSA algorithm and ten chaotic maps
is described in Section 2. The detailed description of the
proposed CCSA approach is provided in Section 3. Exper-
imental results and discussions of the proposed CCSA are
introduced in Section 4. Finally, a summary of the proposed
work is represented in Section 5.
2 Basics and background
2.1 Crow search algorithm
2.1.1 Inspiration analysis
The CSA algorithm is a meta-heuristic algorithm proposed
by Askarzadeh [2] in 2016. The main inspiration of this
algorithm came from crow search mechanism for hiding
their food. Crows is considered one of the most intelligent
birds. They have larger brain compared to their body size.
Crows are clever. Their brain is slightly lower in the brain of
humans. In addition, they in mirror test are self-aware. They
able to remember faces. When they found unfriendly one,
they warn the other crows in a sophisticated communication
way. Additionally, they can store and recall their food dur-
ing several months. They are known to be thieves, as they
are stealing the food of the other birds. They make a use of
their experiences as a thief in predicting pilferer’s behavior.
They are very cautious. When a crow reported of thievery,
they move their hiding places. This enables them to avoid
any kind of future victims.
The four main principles of CSA are defined as follows:
– Crows live in the flock’s form
– Crows keep in their memory their hiding places of foods
– Each member of crow follows each other while doing
thievery
– Crows are very cautions against thievery; they protect
their caches by a probability
2.1.2 Mathematical model of CSA
Suppose the number of crows/flock denotes as M. D is the
total number of dimensions, y j,t is the position of j crow at
iteration t in the search space, where j = 1, 2, ...M. tMax
is the maximum number of iterations.
Each crow has memory where the position of hiding
place is memorized. N j,t is the position of hiding place
173
at iteration t for crow j . N j,t defined as the best position
obtained so far by crow j .
At iteration t, crow j wants to follow the hiding place of
crow z. In this case, there are two cases that may happen:
Case 1: Crow z does not know that crow j follows it
Crow j approaches to the hiding place of crow z. The
updating position of crow j is defined as follows:
y j,t+1 = y j,t+1 + Rj × f l j,t × (N z,t − y j,t ) (1)
where f l denotes the flight length. Rj is a random
number ∈ [0, 1]. f l has a great influence on search-
ing capability. f l with small value leads to local search,
while the large value leads to global search.
Case 2: Crow z knows that crow j follows it Crow z will
change its position in the search space to protect its cache.
The previous two cases are mathematically defined as
follows:

y j,t +Rj ×f l j,t ×(N z,t −y j,t ), Rz ≥ qAP j,t
y j,t+1
= (2)
Choose a rand position , otherwise
where Rz is a random number ∈ [0, 1] and AP j,t is the
awareness probability of crow z at t iteration. AP controls
the balance between exploration and exploitation. Small val-
ues of AP lead to the search on local regions (exploitation),
while the large value leads to global search in the search
space (exploration).
CSA starts with setting the constraints, D, tMax, M, AP ,
and f l. Each crow’s position y is randomly initialized at
search space. At the beginning, the crows y do not have an
experience to hide their food. Thus, they hide their food at
initial positions N. During the algorithm runs, each crow is
evaluated using a predefined fitness function. Then, accord-
ing to the fitness value, the crows update their positions
using Eq. (2). Each new position is checked for feasibility.
The crows update their memory as follows:

y j,t+1 , F n(y j,t+1 ) is better than F n(N j,t )
N j,t+1 = (3)
N j,t , otherwise
where F n() is defined as the objective function.
As long as the termination criteria are met, the best
174 Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188

position is reported as the optimal solution. The pseudo code
of CSA is defined at Algorithm 1.
algorithms. The main idea of it is to transform param-
eters/variables from the chaos to the solution space. It
depends for searching of global optimum on chaotic motion
properties such as ergodicity, regularity, and stochastic
properties. The main privileges of COA are fast convergence
rate and their capability for avoiding local minima. All of
these privileges can significantly improve the performance
of evolutionary algorithms [59].
Chaotic maps have a form of determinate, where no
random factors are used. In this work, ten distinguished
non-invertible one-dimensional maps are adopted to obtain
chaotic sets. The adopted chaotic maps are defined in
Table 1. In this table, q denotes the index of the chaotic
sequence p, and pq is the qth number in the chaotic
sequence. The rest of the parameters including d, c, and μ
are the control parameters, which determine the chaotic
behavior of the dynamic system. The initial point p0 is set to
0.7 for all chaos maps, as the initial values for chaotic map
may have a great influence of fluctuation patterns on chaotic
maps. We used the initial values as in [39]. Figure 1 shows
the visualization of these maps for C chaotic map value.

3 The proposed chaotic crow search algorithm

In this section, the random variables used for updating crow

2.2 Chaotic map
Chaos is defined as a phenomenon. Any change of its ini-
tial condition may lead to non-linear change for the future
behavior. Chaos optimization is one of the recent search
position are replaced with chaotic variables. As updating
crow position influences the optimal solution and conver-
gence rate, chaotic sequence generated from chaotic maps
is used. Such a combination of chaos with CCSA is defined
as CCSA. In this study, ten different chaotic maps are used
for the optimization process. These maps are chebychev,

Table 1 The ten adapted chaotic maps

No. Name Definition Range

CCSA1 Chebyshev pq+1 = cos(q cos−1 (pq )) (−1,1)

CCSA2 Circle pq+1 = mod (pq + d − ( 2π c
) sin(2πpq ), 1) , c = 0.5 and d = 0.2 (0,1)

1, pq = 0
CCSA3 Guass/mouse pq+1 = 1 (0,1)
mod (pq ,1) , otherwise
CCSA4 Iterative pq+1 = sin( cπ
pq ) , c = 0.7 (−1,1)
CCSA5 Logistic pq+1 = cp
⎧ qp(1 − pq ), c = 4 (0,1)
⎪
⎪
q
l , 0 ≤ pq < l
⎪
⎪
⎨ q −l , l ≤ p < 0.5
p
q
CCSA6 Piecewise pq+1 = 0.5−l , l = 0.4 (0,1)
⎪
⎪
1−l−pq
, 0.5 ≤ pq < 1 − l
⎪
⎪ 0.5−l
⎩ 1−pq , 1 − l ≤ p < 1
l q
CCSA7 Sine pq+1 = 4c sin(πpq ), c = 4 (0,1)
CCSA8 Singer pq+1 = μ(7.86pq − 23.31pq2 + 28.75pq3 − 13.302875pq4 ) , μ = 1.07 (0,1)
CCSA9 Sinusoidal pq+1 = cp
 qp sin(πpq ) , c = 2.3
2 (0,1)
q
, pq < 0.7
CCSA10 Tent pq+1 = 0.7 (0,1)
10
3 (1 − p q ), p q ≥ 0.7
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
Fig. 1 Visualization of chaotic maps
sine, sinusoidal, tent, circle, singer, guass/mouse, logistic,
iterative, and piecewise. The mathematical formula of these
maps is defined at Section 2.2. These maps can significantly
improve the performance and convergence rate of CSA
as it will be demonstrated later in the following section.
The CSA approach combined with chaotic sequences is
described in Eq. (4).
 j,t
y +Cj ×f l j,t ×(N z,t −y j,t ), Cz ≥ AP j,t
y j,t+1 = (4)
Choose a rand position , otherwise
where C(j ) is the obtained value of chaotic map at j th iter-
ation and C(z) is the obtained value of chaotic map at zth
iteration.
In this work, a novel binary CCSA for the feature selec-
tion task is proposed. In binary CCSA, the solution pool is in
binary form, where the solutions are restricted to the binary
{0, 1}. The agents transfer from continues to binary space
using the following equations.
 At the beginning, CCSA starts with setting adjustable
1 if (s(y j,t+1 )) ≥ rand()
y j,t+1 = (5)
0 otherwise
175
where
1
s(y j,t+1 ) = j,t+1 −0.5)
(6)
1 + e10(y
where rand() is a random number from uniform distribution
[0, 1] and y j,t+1 is the updated binary position at t iteration.
In this paper, CCSA is implemented as a feature selec-
tion algorithm-based wrapper method. In CCSA, a chaotic
sequence is embedded in its searching iterations. The opti-
mal feature subset describing the dataset is selected using
CCSA. The purpose of feature selection is to improve the
classification performance, reduce feature subset length,
and reduce the computational cost. The detailed description
is defined as follows:
3.1 Parameter initialization
parameters and randomly initialized crow positions
(solution) in the search space. Each position represents a
176 Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188

Table 2 Parameter settings for CCSA 3.4 Termination criteria

Parameter Value
The optimization process terminates when it reaches the
M 30 maximum number of iterations or when the best solu-
AP 0.1 tion is found. In our case, we used the maximum num-
fl 2 ber of iteration. The maximum number of iteration in all
Lower bound 0 experiments is set to 50.
Upper bound 1 The pseudo code of CCSA and its corresponding
tMax 50 flowchart is defined at Algorithm 2 and Fig. 2, respectively.
D Same as total number of features
in the original dataset

feature subset with different number of features and dif-

ferent length. The initial parameter settings of CCSA are
presented in Table 2.

3.2 Fitness function

At each iteration, each crow position is evaluated using a

specified fitness function F nt . The data is divided randomly
into two different parts, namely training and testing datasets
using m-fold methods. In this study, m sets to 10 to ensure
the stability of the obtained results. In this paper, two objec-
tive criteria are used for evaluation, namely classification
accuracy and the number of selected features. The adopted
fitness function equation combines the two criteria into one
by setting a weight factor as in Eq. (7). Acc is the classifica-
tion accuracy calculated by dividing the number of correctly
classified instances over the total number of instances. K-
nearest neighbor (KNN) is the used classifier where k equals
to 3 with mean absolute distance. KNN is one of super-
vised learning algorithms which depend on classifying new
instance based on distance from the new instance to the
training instances [8]. In this study, KNN is used to deter-
mine the goodness of the selected features. The selection of
K and distance method is based on trial and error method.
Lf is the length of selected feature subset, Lt is the total
number of features, and wf is the weighted factor which 4 Experimental results and discussion
has value in [0, 1]. wf is used to control the importance
of classification accuracy and number of selected features. 4.1 Dataset description
Improving the accuracy is the first objective for any clas-
sifier. Thus, the weight factor is usually set to value near Twenty benchmark datasets from various types including
one [38]. In this study, we set wf to 0.8. The best solution medical/biology and business are used in the experiments.
is the one which maximizes the classification accuracy and The datasets are collected from UCI machine learning
minimizes the number of selected features. repository [3]. A brief description of each adopted dataset
Lf is presented in Table 3. As it can be seen, the adopted
F nt = maximize(Acc + wf × (1 − )) (7) datasets contain missing values in some records. In this
Lt
paper, all these missing values are replaced by the median
3.3 Position updating value of all known values of a feature given class. The
mathematical definition of median method is defined in Eq.
The updating crow positions of CCSA are defined at Eqs. (8). si,j is the missing value for j th feature of a given ith
(2), (4), and (5). class W . For missing categorical values, the most appeared
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188 177

Fig. 2 Chaotic crow search

algorithm flowchart
Set values of
initialize
randomly feature subsets

Assign each feature subset

to a crow position

Fill the row memory with

initial positions

Evaluate each crow

position using

Yes No

Generate new crow

Select a random position
position using Equ. (4)

Yes No
The new position
is feasible?

Update position with new

Keep the current position
one

Yes Fn of new No
position Fn of
memory position

Update memory with new

position Keep the current memory

No
Is Iteration

Yes

Produce the best position

Terminate

value for a feature given class is replaced with the missing 4.2 Performance metrics
value.
In this subsection, six different statistical measurements
s i,j = mediani:si,j ∈Wr si,j (8) are adopted. These measurements are the worst, best, and
178 Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188

Table 3 Dataset description

ID Dataset No. of features No. of instances No. of classes Missing values Type

D1 Chess 36 3196 2 No Game

D2 Poker hand 10 25010 10 No Game
D3 Germen credit 24 1000 2 No Business
D4 Credit approval 15 690 2 Yes Business
D5 Cylinder bands 40 512 2 Yes Physical
D6 Abalone 8 4177 29 No Life
D7 Glass identification 10 214 6 No Physical
D8 Letter recognition 17 20000 26 No Computer
D9 Waveform 21 5000 3 No Physical
D10 Zoo 18 101 2 No Life
D11 Wisconsin Diagnosis Breast Cancer (WBCD) 32 596 2 No Clinical
D12 Mice Protein Expression Dataset (MPED) 82 1080 8 Yes Clinical
D13 Parkinson’s Disease Detection Dataset (PDD) 23 197 2 No Clinical
D14 Cardiotocography 23 2126 3 No Clinical
D15 Hepatitis 19 155 2 Yes Clinical
D16 Lung Cancer 56 32 3 Yes Clinical
D17 Single proton emission computed tomography (SPECT) 44 267 2 No Clinical
D18 Thoracic surgery 17 470 2 No Clinical
D19 Statlog (heart) 13 270 2 No Clinical
D20 Indian Liver Patient Dataset 10 583 2 No Clinical

mean fitness value, standard deviation (SD), average feature tMax

selection size (ASS), and P value from Wilcoxon’s rank Mean fitness = BSi (12)
tMax
sum test. Wilcoxon’s rank sum test is a non-parametric sta- i=1
tistical test with 5% significance level [48]. The statistical
1
length(BSi )
tMax
test is necessary needed in order to prove that the proposed ASS = (13)
algorithm provides a significant improvement compared to tMax L
i=1
other algorithms [7]. Wilcoxon’s rank sum test is more
where BS is the best score obtained so far for each iteration.
sensitive than the t test as it assumes proportionality of dif-
L is number of features in the original dataset.
ferences between two pair samples. Moreover, it is safer
than the t test as it does not assume the normal distributions.
4.3 Analysis and discussion
Additionally, the outliers affect less on Wilcoxon’s test than
t test [7]. Generally speaking, the best values of P are when
In this subsection, various experiments on 20 benchmark
P value <0.05. Therefore, it can be considered a sufficient
datasets are implemented. These experiments aim to eval-
evidence against the null hypothesis. In this work, we used
uate the performance of the proposed CCSA feature selec-
this test to evaluate the performance of each chaotic map
tion algorithm and to compare it with other meta-heuristic
and determine the best one. Worst, best, and mean fitness
value, SD, and ASS are mathematically defined as follows:
Table 4 PC specification

M
i=1 (BSi − μ)
2 Name Detailed settings
SD = (9)
tMax Hardware
CPU Core(TM) i3
tMax Frequency 2.13 GHZ
Best fitness = max BSi (10)
i=1 RAM 2 GB

Software
tMax Operating system Windows 7
Worst fitness = min BSi (11) Language MATLAB R2012R
i=1
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188 179

Table 5 Statistical results

D1 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D2 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1 1.39 1.23 0.07 0.96 CSA 0.77 1.05 0.97 0.07 1
CCSA1 1.04 1.32 1.28 0.06 0.53 2.05E-07 CCSA1 0.74 1.12 1.07 0.06 0.49 1.29E-05
CCSA2 1.09 1.38 1.31 0.07 0.92 1.25E-07 CCSA2 0.81 1.08 1.04 0.07 0.93 2.76E-06
CCSA3 1.02 1.32 1.27 0.07 0.45 7.23E-07 CCSA3 0.81 1.07 1.01 0.07 0.45 0.517
CCSA4 1.04 1.43 1.31 0.1 0.8 1.03E-05 CCSA4 0.81 1.07 1.03 0.06 0.8 9.20E-04
CCSA5 1.03 1.32 1.28 0.06 0.12 8.18E-07 CCSA5 0.82 1.12 1.04 0.06 0.86 4.78E-06
CCSA6 0.97 1.38 1.28 0.06 0.35 1.56E-04 CCSA6 0.69 1.12 1.04 0.07 0.55 4.00E-04
CCSA7 1.07 1.35 1.29 0.05 0.63 4.33E-07 CCSA7 0.82 1.13 1.08 0.06 0.43 3.04E-07
CCSA8 1.04 1.35 1.29 0.07 0.21 1.90E-06 CCSA8 0.77 1.12 1.07 0.07 0.62 1.06E-09
CCSA9 1.03 1.34 1.29 0.06 0.2 8.55E-08 CCSA9 0.76 1.13 1.06 0.08 0.59 1.07E-06
CCSA10 1.1 1.35 1.28 0.07 0.02 4.70E-02 CCSA10 0.82 1.12 1.04 0.07 0.41 1.19E-14

D3 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D4 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 0.97 1.4 1.33 0.12 0.36 CSA 1.14 1.27 1.24 0.04 1
CCSA1 1.03 1.47 1.42 0.08 0.54 1.57E-08 CCSA1 1.08 1.37 1.33 0.05 0.73 2.05E-14
CCSA2 0.96 1.47 1.41 0.11 0.8 2.28E-09 CCSA2 1.02 1.42 1.34 0.08 0.99 6.89E-10
CCSA3 1.02 1.45 1.35 0.14 0.57 0.002 CCSA3 1.02 1.43 1.33 0.09 0.95 1.85E-08
CCSA4 0.97 1.47 1.42 0.12 0.73 3.77E-12 CCSA4 1 1.42 1.33 0.09 0.99 1.44E-05
CCSA5 1 1.47 1.4 0.12 0.44 3.64E-09 CCSA5 0.99 1.39 1.33 0.08 0.8 3.59E-11
CCSA6 0.94 1.47 1.4 0.13 0.08 3.01E-08 CCSA6 1.15 1.48 1.37 0.08 0.94 1.25E-07
CCSA7 1.04 1.47 1.41 0.1 0.04 3.52E-05 CCSA7 1.05 1.4 1.31 0.05 0.68 1.20E-07
CCSA8 0.99 1.47 1.42 0.1 0.07 2.11E-09 CCSA8 1 1.35 1.31 0.07 0.32 5.22E-10
CCSA9 1.01 1.47 1.41 0.1 0.09 3.78E-06 CCSA9 1 1.39 1.32 0.08 0.48 1.55E-08
CCSA10 0.98 1.47 1.37 0.14 0.13 1.00E-02 CCSA10 1.06 1.37 1.32 0.06 0.12 4.29E-17

D5 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D6 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1.01 1.37 1.3 0.11 0.21 CSA 0.46 0.52 0.77 0.1 0.5
CCSA1 1.03 1.4 1.36 0.08 0.07 1.11E-09 CCSA1 0.47 0.9 0.86 0.09 0.12 5.24E-09
CCSA2 1 1.45 1.38 0.09 0.26 9.86E-09 CCSA2 0.48 0.9 0.84 0.1 0.78 1.64E-05
CCSA3 0.99 1.44 1.32 0.14 0.75 6.00E-03 CCSA3 0.47 0.88 0.82 0.09 0.59 1.37E-08
CCSA4 0.98 1.45 1.37 0.1 0.82 4.38E-06 CCSA4 0.48 0.89 0.87 0.07 0.18 9.13E-14
CCSA5 1.01 1.39 1.34 0.08 0.46 1.26E-04 CCSA5 0.48 0.9 0.84 0.09 0.22 1.88E-09
CCSA6 1 1.41 1.34 0.1 0.46 8.48E-06 CCSA6 0.48 0.9 0.85 0.09 0.8 4.56E-08
CCSA7 1.02 1.45 1.34 0.08 0.18 1.27E-07 CCSA7 0.55 0.9 0.87 0.07 0.16 6.60E-13
CCSA8 1.02 1.41 1.36 0.08 0.02 6.00E-07 CCSA8 0.49 0.9 0.87 0.07 0.13 6.66E-13
CCSA9 1.01 1.41 1.36 0.08 0.06 5.43E-07 CCSA9 0.49 0.9 0.87 0.07 0.13 6.66E-13
CCSA10 1 1.45 1.4 0.09 1 1.24E-09 CCSA10 0.4 0.9 0.82 0.1 0.38 4.03E-07

D7 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D8 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1.01 1.66 1.58 0.16 0.28 CSA 1.08 1.3 1.25 0.06 0.97
CCSA1 0.95 1.72 1.63 0.14 0.37 1.38E-05 CCSA1 1.13 1.3 1.25 0.05 0.66 5.14E-04
CCSA2 1.04 1.73 1.59 0.18 0.37 2.68E-02 CCSA2 1.07 1.36 1.29 0.07 0.99 1.08E-04
CCSA3 1.05 1.72 1.49 0.19 0.34 5.62E-02 CCSA3 1.09 1.28 1.24 0.04 1 4.79E-05
CCSA4 1.32 1.73 1.63 0.12 0.36 7.43E-04 CCSA4 0.09 1.3 1.25 0.05 0.69 1.70E-05
CCSA5 1.25 1.73 1.62 0.16 0.48 1.28E-04 CCSA5 1.05 1.34 1.26 0.07 0.83 5.40E-01
CCSA6 1.07 1.73 1.63 0.12 0.3 1.90E-02 CCSA6 1.06 1.35 1.28 0.07 0.95 2.50E-05
CCSA7 1.13 1.73 1.63 0.12 0.22 2.10E-05 CCSA7 1.13 1.36 1.28 0.05 0.79 1.20E-05
CCSA8 1.15 1.73 1.62 0.12 0.31 9.50E-03 CCSA8 1.3 1.33 1.25 0.68 0.68 1.13E-01
CCSA9 1.07 1.66 1.62 0.12 0.25 8.05E-04 CCSA9 1.06 1.29 1.24 0.05 0.89 9.13E-05
CCSA10 1.06 1.52 1.39 0.11 0.99 5.60E-03 CCSA10 0.98 1.36 1.27 0.09 1 3.40E-03
180 Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188

Table 5 (continued)

D9 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D10 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1.05 1.3 1.25 0.07 0.55 CSA 1.18 1.49 1.39 0.1 0.54
CCSA1 1.06 1.36 1.29 0.07 0.68 1.99E-04 CCSA1 1.18 1.53 1.45 0.08 0.7 2.34E-04
CCSA2 1.05 1.38 1.32 0.08 0.98 5.47E-09 CCSA2 1.21 1.54 1.46 0.09 0.9 7.20E-04
CCSA3 1.01 1.36 1.31 0.08 0.97 6.17E-08 CCSA3 1.19 1.54 1.41 0.08 0.44 7.47E-02
CCSA4 1.04 1.38 1.33 0.08 0.94 6.46E-07 CCSA4 1.13 1.43 1.43 0.09 0.83 2.13E-04
CCSA5 1.07 1.37 1.29 0.08 0.78 4.23E-05 CCSA5 1.2 1.47 1.41 0.06 0.37 8.20E-01
CCSA6 1.07 1.38 1.31 0.07 0.84 7.04E-07 CCSA6 1.17 1.45 1.4 0.07 0.41 2.64E-04
CCSA7 1.08 1.38 1.32 0.07 0.65 4.46E-08 CCSA7 1.2 1.55 1.46 0.06 0.18 9.56E-05
CCSA8 1.04 1.36 1.31 0.07 0.74 2.06E-08 CCSA8 1.24 1.5 1.44 0.07 0.26 3.13E-05
CCSA9 1.03 1.4 1.3 0.08 0.78 1.21E-05 CCSA9 1.21 1.49 1.45 0.08 0.45 2.34E-05
CCSA10 1.03 1.36 1.32 0.07 1 3.35E-06 CCSA10 1.26 1.49 1.44 0.07 1 4.31E-02

D11 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D12 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1.16 1.62 1.52 0.13 0.15 CSA 1.27 1.7 1.59 0.14 0.21
CCSA1 1.27 1.69 1.64 0.09 0.36 3.77E-08 CCSA1 1.26 1.75 1.66 0.1 0.2 9.90E-04
CCSA2 1.2 1.69 1.61 0.1 0.72 8.05E-06 CCSA2 1.27 1.73 1.63 0.09 0.18 4.15E-03
CCSA3 1.22 1.66 1.57 0.13 0.9 4.21E-01 CCSA3 1.31 1.58 1.5 0.07 0.33 9.19E-02
CCSA4 1.28 1.66 1.58 0.1 0.1 8.76E-05 CCSA4 1.29 1.7 1.61 0.1 0.26 2.79E-03
CCSA5 1.21 1.68 1.59 0.09 0.51 4.60E-02 CCSA5 1.27 1.77 1.68 0.13 0.25 1.23E-05
CCSA6 1.22 1.68 1.63 0.09 0.5 3.90E-07 CCSA6 1.25 1.77 1.67 0.13 0.19 2.62E-04
CCSA7 1.25 1.69 1.65 0.08 0.2 2.13E-08 CCSA7 1.3 1.76 1.68 0.09 0.27 6.14E-05
CCSA8 1.25 1.66 0.09 0.09 0.15 3.21E-02 CCSA8 1.33 1.77 1.67 0.1 0.3 9.81E-04
CCSA9 1.17 1.69 1.63 0.1 0.53 8.25E-08 CCSA9 1.26 1.74 1.65 0.11 0.12 3.90E-03
CCSA10 1.23 1.67 1.6 0.12 0.16 2.36E-04 CCSA10 1.3 1.62 1.54 0.09 1 1.65E-03

D13 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D14 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1.07 1.52 1.4 0.12 0.39 CSA 1.17 1.5 1.42 0.1 0.33
CCSA1 1.18 1.64 1.59 0.1 0.04 2.86E-13 CCSA1 1.23 1.55 1.51 0.07 0.44 2.95E-02
CCSA2 1.09 1.64 1.57 0.11 0.25 5.64E-10 CCSA2 1.15 1.57 1.53 0.09 0.98 2.74E-08
CCSA3 1.15 1.58 1.51 0.12 0.51 1.78E-08 CCSA3 1.16 1.57 1.48 0.1 0.93 7.31E-02
CCSA4 1.13 1.64 1.55 0.13 0.18 9.12E-08 CCSA4 1.15 1.58 1.53 0.09 0.07 1.00E-06
CCSA5 1.16 1.64 1.57 0.11 0.14 4.72E-11 CCSA5 1.19 1.57 1.49 0.08 0.69 2.15E-02
CCSA6 1.16 1.64 1.55 0.15 0.21 3.31E-08 CCSA6 1.19 1.57 1.5 0.08 0.43 4.33E-03
CCSA7 1.18 1.64 1.59 0.1 0.2 2.04E-11 CCSA7 1.19 1.58 1.53 0.07 0.67 1.20E-06
CCSA8 1.2 1.63 1.56 0.09 0.09 3.95E-11 CCSA8 1.22 1.58 1.51 0.07 0.31 1.84E-03
CCSA9 1.18 1.64 1.58 0.1 0.08 1.16E-12 CCSA9 1.16 1.58 1.51 0.08 0.19 6.26E-03
CCSA10 1.14 1.63 1.52 0.14 0.47 3.70E-08 CCSA10 1.16 1.58 1.5 0.1 0.69 4.70E-04

D15 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D16 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1.14 1.72 1.52 0.22 0.3 CSA 0.69 1.83 1.52 0.36 0.1
CCSA1 1.18 1.76 1.7 0.11 0.14 7.71E-04 CCSA1 0.71 1.84 1.64 0.25 0.1 4.24E-02
CCSA2 1.13 1.8 1.66 0.18 0.17 9.80E-04 CCSA2 0.9 1.84 1.49 0.31 0.32 9.12E-04
CCSA3 1.18 1.8 1.62 0.17 0.21 1.48E-04 CCSA3 0.83 1.86 1.58 0.3 0.06 4.55E-04
CCSA4 1.1 1.8 1.68 0.19 0.97 3.28E-06 CCSA4 0.81 1.85 1.59 0.36 0.16 2.27E-04
CCSA5 1.19 1.8 1.68 0.21 0.3 6.22E-07 CCSA5 0.89 1.84 1.62 0.28 0.1 4.55E-03
CCSA6 1.18 1.76 1.65 0.15 0.13 7.72E-03 CCSA6 0.75 1.85 1.62 0.3 0.15 3.32E-04
CCSA7 1.18 1.8 1.69 0.11 0.18 1.20E-04 CCSA7 0.91 1.85 1.64 0.24 0.11 2.58E-04
CCSA8 1.08 1.8 1.68 0.15 0.09 9.45E-03 CCSA8 0.59 1.84 1.64 0.29 0.09 6.06E-04
CCSA9 1.04 1.76 1.65 0.17 0.1 5.76E-03 CCSA9 0.77 1.84 1.69 0.29 0.11 9.52E-04
CCSA10 1.02 1.8 1.65 0.2 0.23 5.14E-05 CCSA10 0.62 1.85 1.66 0.34 0.1 2.27E-05
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188 181

Table 5 (continued)

D17 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D18 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 1.04 1.73 1.5 0.2 0.12 CSA 1.09 1.61 1.51 0.15 0.37
CCSA1 1.06 1.81 1.63 0.2 0.49 6.21E-05 CCSA1 1.11 1.76 1.66 0.14 0.11 4.49E-08
CCSA2 1.03 1.81 1.66 0.21 0.06 6.66E-05 CCSA2 1.2 1.76 1.62 0.15 0.4 9.26E-05
CCSA3 1.08 1.77 1.43 0.15 0.43 1.31E-02 CCSA3 1.17 1.61 1.52 0.12 0.28 9.69E-02
CCSA4 1.08 1.81 1.65 0.2 0.17 1.99E-04 CCSA4 1.16 1.76 1.64 0.15 0.78 4.10E-07
CCSA5 1.08 1.81 1.66 0.19 0.11 6.29E-05 CCSA5 1.09 1.76 1.62 0.15 0.94 4.77E-05
CCSA6 1.12 1.81 1.69 0.19 0.07 3.38E-06 CCSA6 1.12 1.76 1.62 0.15 0.15 6.92E-05
CCSA7 1.14 1.81 1.69 0.17 0.07 5.36E-06 CCSA7 1.19 1.76 1.7 0.12 0.64 9.80E-09
CCSA8 1.09 1.53 1.49 0.09 0.04 7.82E-04 CCSA8 1.2 1.76 1.66 0.15 0.2 1.15E-08
CCSA9 1.1 1.75 1.65 0.16 0.07 2.81E-04 CCSA9 1.17 1.76 1.69 0.14 0.88 8.30E-09
CCSA10 1.04 1.81 1.65 0.21 0.15 5.25E-04 CCSA10 1.18 1.76 1.64 0.15 0.47 2.62E-06

D19 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val. D20 Worst Best Mean SD ASS P val.
CSA 0.91 1.37 1.3 0.13 0.27 CSA 0.86 1.33 1.27 0.15 0.25
CCSA1 0.99 1.45 1.39 0.1 0.74 8.47E-08 CCSA1 0.98 1.44 1.39 0.13 0.19 3.02E-11
CCSA2 0.95 1.45 1.37 0.12 0.76 1.30E-05 CCSA2 0.94 1.44 1.37 0.14 0.29 2.63E-09
CCSA3 1 1.36 1.3 0.09 0.41 6.65E-05 CCSA3 0.96 1.41 1.32 0.14 0.19 7.11E-08
CCSA4 0.96 1.45 1.38 0.12 0.73 2.47E-08 CCSA4 0.92 1.44 1.4 0.11 0.33 3.81E-10
CCSA5 0.94 1.45 1.36 0.13 0.39 1.77E-05 CCSA5 0.99 1.44 1.38 0.11 0.18 4.34E-10
CCSA6 0.92 1.45 1.37 0.12 0.6 1.07E-07 CCSA6 0.93 1.44 1.38 0.12 0.45 2.18E-08
CCSA7 0.95 1.45 1.39 0.1 0.84 1.87E-08 CCSA7 0.94 1.44 1.41 0.11 0.17 1.98E-13
CCSA8 0.94 1.44 1.39 0.12 0.6 6.10E-10 CCSA8 0.95 1.44 1.39 0.1 0.59 1.99E-09
CCSA9 0.95 1.45 1.4 0.12 0.42 1.94E-10 CCSA9 1.03 1.44 1.41 0.1 0.15 2.66E-13
CCSA10 0.9 1.43 1.36 0.13 0.76 3.33E-05 CCSA10 0.97 1.44 1.38 0.12 0.26 4.42E-08

algorithms. All these experiments are performed on the
same PC with the same specification. The detailed settings
are presented in Table 4.
4.3.1 The performance of CCSA with different chaotic maps
The main objective of this experiment is to evaluate the
performance of CCSA with different chaotic maps and
determine the optimal chaotic map.
Table 5 compares CCSA with different chaotic maps with
the original CSA in terms of mean, best, and worst fit-
ness, ASS, SD, and P value of Wilcoxon’s rank sum test.
P value is used to compared CSA with different versions
of CCSA. The best results of worst, mean, and best fitness,
standard deviation, and average selection size are under-
lined. Despite, the worst results of P value where P < 0.05
are underlined. It must be pointed out that CCSA1, CCSA2,.
. ., CCSA10 in the Table 5 refer to the ten adopted chaotic
maps as shown in Table 1. Also it must be pointed out
that the marks D1, D2, . . ., D20 in Table 5 refer to the
adopted benchmarks as shown in Table 3. As it can be
observed from Table 5, CCSA with different chaotic maps
overtakes the standard CSA. Moreover, it can be noticed
that in most cases, CCSA7 obtains the highest statistical
results compared with the others. In addition, the obtained
P value proves this improvement, which means sine chaotic
map can improve the performance of CSA. Thus, these
results prove that sine map is statistically significant than
CSA, as it obtains good classification performance with
the minimum number of features. The highest classification
performance with small size of features is highly desired
in biology and medicine. This is due to fewer experiments
needed for patients to detect a disease or cancer. Also, it
can be useful for reducing the cost involved in each exper-
iment. However, CCSA3 in most of the cases obtains the
worst results. Moreover, P value shows that, too, there is no
huge difference between CSA and CCSA3 because P value
exceeds 0.05. According to these results, sine chaotic map is
selected to be the appropriate map of CCSA. In the follow-
ing section, CCSA with sine chaotic map will be evaluated
further in more details.
For further comparison of CCSA with different chaotic
maps, graphical representation of the convergence curve of
CCSA’s versions are analyzed as well. The convergence
curve of CCSA with different chaotic maps on 20 bench-
mark datasets is shown in Fig. 3. In this figure, the number
of iterations is equal to 50. As it can be observed from this
figure, almost all CCSA with different chaotic maps obtain
182
D1 D2
D3 D4
D5 D6
D7 D8
Fig. 3 Performance comparison on D1 to D20
better results. This is due to that their curves are higher than
the original one “colored with black.” In addition, it can
be noticed that in most cases, CCSA algorithms converge
faster towards the global optima than CSA. Additionally, it
can be observed that CCSA7 curve at most cases obtains
the highest results. However, CCSA3 obtains the lowest
results. These results are consistent with the obtained results
in Table 5. Such an improvement of the results came from
embedding chaotic sequence in the searching iterations of
CSA. This helps the algorithm to avoid local optima and
reach the global optima more faster.
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
D9 D10
D11 D12
D13 D14
D15 D16
Fig. 3 (continued)
4.3.2 CCSA vs. other optimization algorithms
In this subsection, the performance of CCSA with sine
chaotic map is compared with other optimization algo-
rithms. These algorithms are proposed in the literature for
solving the feature selection problem. These algorithms
are particle swarm optimization (PSO) [31], artificial bee
colony (ABC) [42], chicken swarm optimization (CSO)
[18], flower pollination algorithm (FPA) [41], moth-flame
optimization (MFO) [55], gray wolf optimizer (GWO) [8],
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
D17 D18
D19 D20
Fig. 3 (continued)
whale optimization algorithm (WOA) [40], sine cosine algo-
rithm (SCA) [19], and CSA. The parameter settings for all
adopted optimization algorithms are shown in Table 6. In
addition, the default parameters for all algorithms are maxi-
mum generation = 50, number of search agents = 30, lower
bound = 1, and upper bound = size of features.
Table 7 compares the average score for 50 iterations. As
it can be seen, the performance of CCSA, WOA, and FPA
is comparable. CCSA algorithms obtains the highest mean
fitness value on 13 out of 20 benchmarks datasets (D2, D3,
D6, D8, D9, D11, D13, D14, D15, D17, D18, D19, and
D20), despite WOA that obtains the same or higher results
than CCSA for six benchmark datasets (D1, D4, D8, D10,
D16, and D19). FPA obtains the highest mean fitness for the
rest of the datasets (D4, D5, and D7). WOA is found to be
the second most effective performing on the 20 benchmark
datasets. MFO for most cases obtains the worst results.
Table 8 compares the best score obtained from other
meta-heuristic algorithms with CCSA and CSA. As it can
be seen from this table, CCSA obtains the highest results in
almost most of the cases. WOA is in the second place and
FPA is in the third place. CCSA outperform the other algo-
rithms for D2, D5, D6, D8, D9, D12, D13, D14, D16, D17,
D18, and D19, while WOA outperforms for D4, D10, D11,
D14, D15, and D20 and FPA for D1, D4, and D7. Also, it
can be observed, CCSA improves the performance of CSA.
Table 9 compares the worst fitness value for meta-
heuristics algorithms. As it can be observed, FPA obtains
the highest results. CSA algorithm obtains almost the worst
results. This is due to the memory of each crow set with ini-
tial random positions, as the assumption of the crows have
183
Table 6 Meta-heuristic algorithm parameter settings
Algorithm Parameter Value
PSO An inertial weight 1
A inertia weight damping ratio 0.9
Personal learning coefficient 1.5
Global learning coefficient 2.0
ABC A number of colony size 10
A number of food source 5
A number of limit trials 5
CSO A number of chicken updated 10
The percent of roosters population size 0.15
The percent of hens population size 0.7
The percent of mother hens population size 0.05
FPA The probability switch = 0.6
MFO a −1
b 1
GWO a 2
WOA a 2
b 1
SCA b 2
no experiences. The algorithm starts with randomly initial-
ized positions followed by random selection of one of the
flock crows to be followed. Then, the crow discovers the
position of the food hidden N z . However, FPA starts with
randomly initialized positions followed by sorting the solu-
tions according to their fitness value. The best solution sets
with the optimal value. Then the algorithm enhances the
obtained results from the first iteration. So FPA obtains the
highest results for almost most cases. However, for the other
algorithms such as PSO, they have many parameters. These
parameters can highly effected on the obtained results.
Table 10 compares the stability of the competing algo-
rithms with CCSA. As it can be seen, MFO is superior
compared to the others. However, with this good stability, it
obtains the worst results in terms of mean, best, and worst
fitness. The reason behind that is the weakness of these
algorithms for exploitation because of the random parame-
ters. Thus, the initial solution improves slowly. The rest of
the other algorithms are comparable with each other.
The main privilege of CSA is that it has less parame-
ters to adjust. These parameters can highly influence on
the performance of any optimization algorithm. However,
selecting the optimum value for each is considered a diffi-
cult task. This paper presents a new mechanism for choosing
the optimal parameter values through using chaotic maps,
where the random parameters are replaced with acquired
values from the chaotic map. The experimental results show
that chaotic maps, especially sine chaotic map, can increase
the stability and the performance of CSA. In addition, the
results show the repeatability, stability, and the ability of
184 Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188

Table 7 Mean fitness value for meta-heuristic algorithms

PSO ABC CSO FPA MFO GWO WOA SCA CSA CCSA

D1 1.24 1.16 1.31 1.4 1.24 1.28 1.32 1.3 1.23 1.29
D2 1.04 1.03 0.98 1.07 0.95 0.99 0.99 1.04 0.97 1.08
D3 1.14 1.16 1.2 1.35 1.14 1.16 1.38 1.3 1.33 1.41
D4 1.35 1.34 1.29 1.38 1.35 1.28 1.38 1.34 1.24 1.31
D5 1.2 1.09 1.2 1.39 1.12 1.12 1.35 1.24 1.3 1.34
D6 0.76 0.74 0.77 0.81 0.64 0.69 0.81 0.77 0.77 0.87
D7 1.43 1.51 1.57 1.66 1.43 1.5 1.66 1.56 1.58 1.63
D8 1.24 1.18 1.15 1.19 1.19 1.24 1.28 1.18 1.25 1.28
D9 1.28 1.17 1.17 1.3 1.23 1.24 1.29 1.23 1.25 1.32
D10 1.4 1.35 1.32 1.47 1.28 1.36 1.48 1.37 1.39 1.46
D11 1.37 1.36 1.4 1.57 1.3 1.35 1.58 1.48 1.52 1.65
D12 1.42 1.26 1.42 1.59 1.28 1.32 1.61 1.5 1.59 1.68
D13 1.25 1.35 1.31 1.52 1.23 1.29 1.56 1.42 1.4 1.59
D14 1.35 1.35 1.36 1.5 1.21 1.3 1.52 1.4 1.42 1.53
D15 1.37 1.4 1.32 1.68 1.26 1.39 1.67 1.5 1.52 1.69
D16 1 1.12 1.18 1.42 0.93 1.02 1.7 1.3 1.52 1.64
D17 1.12 1.15 1.27 1.61 1.13 1.15 1.67 1.37 1.5 1.69
D18 1.42 1.48 1.37 1.6 1.35 1.41 1.47 1.42 1.51 1.7
D19 1.19 1.14 1.13 1.29 1.07 1.12 1.39 1.27 1.3 1.39
D20 1.24 1.26 1.22 1.36 1.14 1.2 1.37 1.28 1.27 1.41

Table 8 Best fitness value for meta-heuristic algorithms

PSO ABC CSO FPA MFO GWO WOA SCA CSA CCSA

D1 1.28 1.17 1.34 1.4 1.26 1.35 1.35 1.32 1.39 1.35
D2 1.05 1.08 1.05 1.09 0.96 1.05 1.08 1.08 1.05 1.13
D3 1.16 1.31 1.23 1.43 1.17 1.25 1.47 1.34 1.4 1.47
D4 1.41 1.43 1.35 1.46 1.36 1.36 1.46 1.4 1.27 1.4
D5 1.28 1.15 1.25 1.44 1.14 1.15 1.39 1.28 1.37 1.45
D6 0.82 0.8 0.8 0.87 0.66 0.71 0.88 0.78 0.52 0.9
D7 1.5 1.57 1.61 1.75 1.45 1.55 1.71 1.6 1.7 1.73
D8 1.28 1.23 1.15 1.21 1.2 1.28 1.34 1.2 1.33 1.36
D9 1.32 1.22 1.2 1.34 1.24 1.33 1.36 1.25 1.3 1.38
D10 1.44 1.39 1.37 1.53 1.3 1.42 1.57 1.4 1.51 1.55
D11 1.41 1.47 1.45 1.62 1.31 1.38 1.71 1.51 1.68 1.7
D12 1.45 1.3 1.45 1.69 1.29 1.38 1.74 1.55 1.73 1.76
D13 1.28 1.4 1.35 1.6 1.24 1.32 1.62 1.45 1.52 1.64
D14 1.38 1.41 1.38 1.55 1.29 1.35 1.58 1.45 1.5 1.58
D15 1.4 1.47 1.39 1.8 1.29 1.42 1.81 1.55 1.72 1.8
D16 1.02 1.18 1.25 1.78 1.02 1.07 1.8 1.38 1.86 1.85
D17 1.19 1.15 1.32 1.79 1.14 1.2 1.78 1.4 1.73 1.81
D18 1.48 1.53 1.42 1.7 1.36 1.42 1.58 1.48 1.66 1.76
D19 1.24 1.22 1.18 1.32 1.09 1.17 1.43 1.32 1.37 1.45
D20 1.3 1.32 1.24 1.4 1.18 1.3 1.45 1.3 1.33 1.44
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188 185

Table 9 Worst fitness value for meta-heuristic algorithms

PSO ABC CSO FPA MFO GWO WOA SCA CSA CCSA

D1 1.19 1.16 1.26 1.39 1.23 1.2 1.24 1.15 1 1.07

D2 1 0.93 0.9 1.02 0.9 0.9 0.89 0.85 0.77 0.81
D3 1.01 1 1.03 1.1 1 1.07 1.05 1.06 0.97 1.04
D4 1.08 1.22 1.13 1.31 1.33 1.25 1.2 1.23 1.14 1.05
D5 1.11 1.02 1.07 1.22 1.09 1.07 1.07 1.04 1.01 1.02
D6 0.7 0.73 0.68 0.77 0.62 0.62 0.68 0.68 0.46 0.55
D7 1.31 1.41 1.45 1.52 1.42 1.44 1.41 1.33 1.01 1.13
D8 1.18 1.12 1.15 1.16 1.18 1.16 1.21 1.15 1.08 1.13
D9 1.15 1.09 1.15 1.28 1.21 1.13 1.15 1.13 1.05 1.08
D10 1.35 1.27 1.26 1.38 1.26 1.31 1.3 1.25 1.18 1.2
D11 1.31 1.27 1.3 1.27 1.27 1.3 1.27 1.3 1.16 1.25
D12 1.28 1.24 1.3 1.52 1.25 1.28 1.27 1.3 1.27 1.3
D13 1.2 1.29 1.23 1.36 1.2 1.21 1.25 1.17 1.07 1.18
D14 1.29 1.23 1.26 1.39 1.24 1.27 1.25 1.25 1.17 1.19
D15 1.29 1.4 1.25 1.52 1.24 1.21 1.2 1.25 1.14 1.18
D16 0.98 0.98 0.97 1.28 0.9 0.92 1.02 0.92 0.69 0.91
D17 1.13 1.15 1.13 1.38 1.1 1.13 1.12 0.98 1.04 1.14
D18 1.4 1.28 1.32 1.53 1.33 1.4 1.4 1.33 1.09 1.19
D19 1.13 1.01 1.14 1.2 1.05 1.05 1.14 1.15 0.91 0.95
D20 1.12 1.05 1.1 1.29 1.12 1.07 1.1 1.09 0.86 0.94

Table 10 Standard deviation for meta-heuristic algorithms

PSO ABC CSO FPA MFO GWO WOA SCA CSA CCSA

D1 0.03 0.01 0.05 0.01 0.01 0.03 0.03 0.05 0.07 0.05
D2 0.01 0.05 0.05 0.03 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.06
D3 0.02 0.1 0.09 0.1 0.04 0.06 0.15 0.09 0.12 0.1
D4 0.09 0.08 0.1 0.08 0.03 0.06 0.13 0.06 0.04 0.05
D5 0.06 0.07 0.07 0.05 0.03 0.05 0.1 0.08 0.11 0.08
D6 0.04 0.06 0.04 0.05 0.03 0.04 0.06 0.05 0.1 0.07
D7 0.06 0.07 0.08 0.07 0.02 0.05 0.09 0.09 0.16 0.12
D8 0.05 0.06 0 0.02 0.02 0.05 0.04 0.02 0.06 0.05
D9 0.06 0.06 0.04 0.04 0.02 0.09 0.06 0.05 0.07 0.07
D10 0.07 0.06 0.05 0.05 0.04 0.06 0.09 0.05 0.1 0.06
D11 0.06 0.08 0.07 0.09 0.01 0.04 0.09 0.08 0.13 0.08
D12 0.06 0.05 0.06 0.05 0.01 0.06 0.1 0.08 0.14 0.09
D13 0.05 0.09 0.04 0.07 0.02 0.06 0.1 0.08 0.12 0.1
D14 0.04 0.08 0.06 0.07 0.05 0.06 0.09 0.07 0.1 0.07
D15 0.05 0.06 0.06 0.07 0.02 0.08 0.18 0.1 0.22 0.11
D16 0.05 0.1 0.12 0.13 0.04 0.08 0.23 0.18 0.36 0.24
D17 0.06 0 0.08 0.21 0.01 0.07 0.24 0.1 0.2 0.17
D18 0.06 0.11 0.07 0.11 0.02 0.01 0.09 0.07 0.15 0.12
D19 0.09 0.1 0.06 0.05 0.02 0.08 0.1 0.08 0.13 0.1
D20 0.09 0.1 0.06 0.07 0.03 0.11 0.1 0.09 0.15 0.11
186 Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188

Table 11 Comparison between before applying CCSA and after applying CCSA

Before CCSA After CCSA

Lt Accuracy(%) Time (sec) Lf Accuracy(%) Time (sec)

D1 36 94.9467468 0.719863916 21 91.9814006 0.412878573

D2 10 52.1120568 3.898838573 5 56.4238614 1.960385134
D3 24 67.3024206 0.142678961 12 75.2986905 0.068773236
D4 15 81.6397423 0.095975524 9 89.1433695 0.066734388
D5 36 63.9529284 0.099454607 18 74.3023043 0.052294992
D6 8 21.1255002 0.511819257 4 23.9413022 0.426966692
D7 10 97.8919654 0.087094961 3 99.993271 0.04356745
D8 16 90.0411199 1.061973386 11 92.3475118 0.888438378
D9 21 79.3606111 0.123031527 10 83.1285304 0.102288399
D10 16 96.5858538 0.078921282 9 93.6982489 0.041023341
D11 30 94.6010058 0.096846979 14 90.2838101 0.047685087
D12 80 98.6991135 0.231579869 49 100 0.138074349
D13 22 87.2745655 0.095018416 15 90.7859824 0.035512628
D14 22 89.534504 0.291153506 13 91.0358514 0.198558899
D15 20 83.700571 0.093885187 2 100 0.038915681
D16 57 56.0296056 0.073634809 5 100 0.035579996
D17 45 75.8928936 0.099246728 20 81.5086657 0.037070276
D18 17 84.8157717 0.085629223 3 100 0.051169463
D19 13 63.6562316 0.097383518 4 78.8470018 0.043596322
D20 10 66.6812339 0.09964035 1 71.682268 0.051165132

the CCSA for finding the feature subset in the feature space
better than the other evolutionary algorithms. This is due
to the adopted evolutionary algorithms that employ random
parameters in their searching process that can significantly
influence their performance. Moreover, the random behav-
ior of agents such as particle, ant, and firefly can cause the
optimization process stagnation with high probability.
feature selection algorithm. These selected features can be
used further for improving the clustering performance. As
it was mentioned before, clusters built by a subset of salient
features are more practical and interpretable than clusters
built using all of the features, which include noise [6]. Thus,
it can help in better data understanding and interpretation.

4.3.3 Classification performance 5 Conclusion

In this subsection, the selected features of CCSA with sine
chaotic map are evaluated using three criteria. These criteria
are classification accuracy, number of selected features, and
CPU processing time. A comparison between using whole
feature length and using subset of it is shown in Table 11.
In this table, Lt indicates the dataset feature length and Lf
indicates the feature subset of CCSA length. Tenfold cross
validation method is employed. In this study, KNN classifier
with k = 3 and Euclidean distance are adopted. The mean
accuracy of ten folds with CPU processing time in seconds
and number of features are recorded. As it can be seen, using
only a subset of features can highly increase the classifi-
cation performance and reduce the computational time and
memory storage. In addition, it can be observed that in some
cases, the accuracy reaches 100% with less computational
time. These obtained results prove the superiority of CCSA
In this paper, a novel hybridization of chaos with CSA algo-
rithm, namely CCSA, is proposed. Ten chaotic maps are
used in this study to enhance the performance and con-
vergence speed of CSA. CCSA is applied on one of the
challenge problems, namely feature selection. The proposed
CCSA feature selection algorithm has been validated on
20 benchmark datasets. Six different evaluation criteria are
adopted in this study. These criteria are best, worst, and
mean fitness value, SD, ASS, and P value. In addition, the
performance of CCSA is compared with the popular and
most recent meta-heuristic algorithms. These algorithms are
PSO, ABC, CSO, FPA, MFO, GWO, WOA, SCA, and CSA.
The experimental results show that CCSA outperforms the
other algorithms in terms of best and mean fitness value.
Moreover, the results show that the CCSA with sine map
can significantly enhance CSA in terms of classification
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
performance, stability quality, number of selected features,
and convergence speed. Further work on embedding chaotic
maps with other meta-heuristic algorithms will be consid-
ered. For future verification, the performance of CCSA will
be applied on more complex science and real-world engi-
neering problems. Moreover, other chaotic maps are also
worth applying to CSA.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict
of interest.
References
1. Abdullah A, Enayatifa R, Lee M (2012) A hybrid genetic algo-
rithm and chaotic function model for image encryption. Journal of
Electronics and Communication 66(1):806–816
2. Askarzadeh A (2016) A novel metaheuristic method for solv-
ing constrained engineering optimization problems: crow search
algorithm. Comput Struct 169:1–12
3. Bache K, Lichman M UCI Machine learning repository. http://
archive.ics.uci.edu/ml. Retrieved July 19, 2016
4. Blum A, Langley P (1997) Selection of relevant features and
examples in machine learning. Artif Intell 97:245–271
5. Cai JJ, Ma XQ, Li X (2007) Chaotic ant swarm optimization to
economic dispatch. Electr Power Syst Res 77(10):1373–1380
6. Chen CH (2014) A hybrid intelligent model of analyzing clin-
ical breast cancer data using clustering techniques with feature
selection. Appl Soft Comput 20:4–14
7. Derrac J, Garcı́a S, Molina D, Herrera F (2011) A practical tuto-
rial on the use of nonparametric statistical tests as a methodology
for comparing evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms.
Swarm Evol Comput 1(1):3–18
8. Emary E, Zawbaa H, Hassanien A (2016) Binary gray wolf
optimization approaches for feature selection. Neurocomputing
172:371–381
9. Figueiredo E, Ludermir T, Bastos C (2016) Many objective parti-
cle swarm optimization. Inf Sci 374:115–134
10. Gadat S, Younes L (2007) A stochastic algorithm for feature
selection in pattern recognition. Journal of Machine Learning
8:509–547
11. Gai-Ge W, Suash D, Leandro D, Coelho S (2015) Elephant
herding optimization. In: 3rd international symposium on compu-
tational and business intelligence (ISCBI), Bali, pp 1–5
12. Gandomi A, Yang X, Alavi A (2011) Mixed variable structural
optimization using firefly algorithm. Comput Struct 89:2325–
2336
13. Gandomi AH, Yang XS, Talatahari S, Alavi AH (2013) Fire-
fly algorithm with chaos. Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simul
18(1):89–98
14. Geem Z, Kim J, Loganathan G (2001) A new heuristic optimiza-
tion algorithm: harmony search. Simulation 76(2):60–68
15. Goldberg D (1989) Genetic algorithms in search, optimization and
machine learning, 1st edn. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing
Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA. ISBN 0201157675
16. Golub TR (1999) Molecular classification of cancer: class discov-
ery and class prediction by gene expression monitoring. Science
286:531–537
17. Guyon I, Elisseeff A (2003) An introduction to variable and
attribute selection. Machine Learning Research 3:1157–1182
187
18. Hafez AI, Zawbaa HM, Emary E, Mahmoud HA, Hassanien AE
(2015) An innovative approach for feature selection based on
chicken swarm optimization. In: 7th international conference of
soft computing and pattern recognition (SoCPaR), pp 19–24
19. Hafez AI, Zawbaa HM, Emary E, Hassanien AE (2016) Sine
cosine optimization algorithm for feature selection. In: Inter-
national symposium on inovations in intelligent systems and
applications (INISTA), pp 1–5
20. He YY, Zhou JZ, Zhou XQ (2009) Comparison of different
chaotic maps in particle swarm optimization algorithm for long
term cascaded hydroelectric system scheduling. Chaos Solitons
Fractals 42:3169–1376
21. He YY, Zhou JZ, Li CS (2008) A precise chaotic particle swarm
optimization algorithm based on improved tent map. ICNC 7:569–
573
22. He Y, Zhou J, Lu N, Qin H, Lu Y (2010) Differential evolu-
tion algorithm combined with chaotic pattern search. Kybernetika
46(4):684–696
23. Jia H, Ding S, Du M, Xue Y (2016) Approximate normalized cuts
without Eigen-decomposition. Inf Sci 374:135–150
24. Jian L, Li J, Shu K, Liu H (2016) Multi-label informed feature
selection. In: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth international joint
conference on artificial intelligence, pp 1627–1633
25. Kaveh A, Talatahari S (2010) A novel heuristic optimization
method: charged system search. Acta Mech 213:267–289
26. Kennedy J, Eberhart R (1995) Particle swarm optimization. In:
IEEE international conference on neural networks, vol 4, pp 1942–
1948
27. Kohavi R, John G (1997) Wrappers for feature subset selection.
Artif Intell 97(1):273–324
28. Lei Y, Huan L (2003) Feature selection for high-dimensional data:
a fast correlation-based filter solution. In: Proceedings of the 20th
international conference on machine learning (ICML-03), pp 856–
863
29. Li B, Jiang W (1998) Optimizing complex functions by chaos
search. Journal of Cybernetics and Systems 29:409–419
30. Li X, Zhang J, Yin M (2013) Animal migration optimization:
an optimization algorithm inspired by animal migration behavior,
Neural Comput Applic, pages=1–11
31. Lin S, Ying KS-C, Lee Z (2008) Particle swarm optimization for
parameter determination and feature selection of support vector
machines. Expert Syst Appl 35(4):1817–1824
32. Meng X, Gao XZ, Lu L, Liu Y, Zhang H (2016) A new bio-
inspired optimisation algorithm: bird swarm algorithm. J Exp
Theor Artif Intell 28(4):673–687
33. Mingjun J, Tang HW (2004) Application of chaos in simulated
annealing optimization. Chaos Solitons Fractals 21:933–941
34. Mirjalili S, Seyed M, Lewis A (2014) Grey wolf optimizer. Adv
Eng Softw 69:46–61
35. Ng K, Liu H (2000) Customer retention via data mining. AI
Review 14:569–590
36. Repinsek M, Liu S, Mernik L (2012) A note on teaching–learning-
based optimization algorithm. Inf Sci 212:79–93
37. Rui Y, Huang TS, Chang S (1999) Image retrieval: current tech-
niques, promising directions and open issues. J Vis Commun
Image Represent 10:39–62
38. Sarafrazi S (2013) Facing the classification of binary problems
with a gsa-svm hybrid system. Math Comput Model 57:270–278
39. Saremi S, Mirjalili S, Lewis A (2014) Biogeography-based opti-
mization with chaos. Neural Comput & Applic 25(5):1077–1097
40. Sayed G, Darwish A, Hassanien A, Pan S (2016) Breast cancer
diagnosis approach based on meta-heuristic optimization algo-
rithm inspired by bubble-net hunting strategy of whales. In: 10th
international conference on genetic and evolutionary computing
(ICGEC), Fujian, China, pp 306–313
188
41. Sayed S, Nabil E, Badr A (2016) A binary clonal flower pollina-
tion algorithm for feature selection. Pattern Recogn Lett 77:21–27
42. Schiezaro M, Pedrini H (2013) Data feature selection based on
artificial bee colony algorithm. EURASIP Journal on Image and
Video Processing 2013(1):1–8
43. Shilaskar S, Ghatol A (2013) Feature selection for medical diag-
nosis: evaluation for cardiovascular diseases. Expert Syst Appl
40(10):4146–4153
44. Storn R, Price K (1997) Differential evolution -a simple and effi-
cient heuristic for global optimization over continuous spaces. J
Glob Optim 11(4):341–359
45. Tavazoei MS, Haeri M (2007) Comparison of different one-
dimensional maps as chaotic search pattern in chaos optimization
algorithms. Appl Math Comput 187:1076–1085
46. Unler A, Murat A (2010) A discrete particle swarm optimiza-
tion method for feature selection in binary classification problems.
Journal of Operation Research 206:528–539
47. Wanga G, Guo L, Gandomi A, Hao G, Wangb H (2014) Chaotic
krill herd algorithm. Inf Sci 274:17–34
48. Wilcoxon F (1945) Individual comparisons by ranking methods.
Biom Bull 1:80–83
49. Yuan XH, Yuan YB, Zhang YC (2002) A hybrid chaotic genetic
algorithm for short-term hydro system scheduling. Math Comput
Simul 59(4):319–327
50. Xiang T, Liao XF, Wong KW (2007) Comparison of differ-
ent chaotic maps in particle swarm optimization algorithm for
long term cascaded hydroelectric system scheduling. Appl Math
Comput 190:1637–1645
Neural Comput & Applic (2019) 31:171–188
51. Yang DX, Li G, Cheng GD (2007) On the efficiency of chaos
optimization algorithms for global optimization. Chaos Solitons
Fractals 34:1366–1375
52. Yang Y, Pederson JO (1997) A comparative study on feature
selection in text categorization. In: Proceedings of the fourteenth
international conference on machine learning, pp 412–420
53. Yu Z (2014) Hybrid clustering solution selection strategy. Pattern
Recogn 47:3362–3375
54. Yuan XF, Wang YN, Wu LH (2007) Pattern search algorithm
using chaos and its application. Journal of Hunan University,
Natural Sciences 34(9):30–33
55. Zawbaa H, Emary E, Parv B, Shaarawi M (2016) Feature selec-
tion approach based on moth-flame optimization algorithm. In:
IEEE congress on evolutionary computation, Vancouver, Canada,
pp 24–29
56. Zhang H, Sun G (2002) Feature selection using tabu search
method. Pattern Recogn 35:701–711
57. Zhang L, Zhang CJ (2008) Hopf bifurcation analysis of some
hyperchaotic systems with time-delay controllers. Kybernetika
44(1):35–42
58. Zhang N, Ding S, Zhang J (2016) Multi layer elm-rbf for multi-
label learning. Appl Soft Comput 43:535–545
59. Zhang Q, Li Z, Zhou CJ, Wei XP (2013) Bayesian network struc-
ture learning based on the chaotic particle swarm optimization
algorithm. Genet Mol Res 12(4):4468–4479
60. Zhu ZL, Li SP, Yu H (2008) A new approach to generalized
chaos synchronization based on the stability of the error system.
Kybernetika 44(4):492–500