Improved marine predators algorithm for feature selection and SVM optimization

Owing to the rapid development of information science, data analysis based on machine learning has become an interdisciplinary and strategic area. Marine predators algorithm (MPA) is a novel metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the foraging strategies of marine organisms. Considering the randomness of these strategies, an improved algorithm called co-evolutionary cultural mechanism-based marine predators algorithm (CECMPA) is proposed. Through this mechanism, search agents in different spaces can share knowledge and experience to improve the performance of the native algorithm. More specifically, CECMPA has a higher probability of avoiding local optimum and can search the global optimum quickly. In this paper, it is the first to use CECMPA to perform feature subset selection and optimize hyperparameters in support vector machine (SVM) simultaneously. For performance evaluation the proposed method, it is tested on twelve datasets from the university of California Irvine (UCI) repository. Moreover, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can be a real-world application and is spreading in many countries. CECMPA is also applied to a COVID-19 dataset. The experimental results and statistical analysis demonstrate that CECMPA is superior to other compared methods in the literature in terms of several evaluation metrics. The proposed method has strong competitive abilities and promising prospects.