COMPARISON OF DIMENSIONALITY REDUCTION TECHNIQUES USING A BACKPROPAGATION NEURAL NETWORK BASED CLASSIFIER

Data mining methods are used to mine voluminous data to find useful information from data. The data that is to be mined may have a large number of dimensions, so the mining process will take a lot of time. In general, the computation time is an exponential function of the number of dimensions. It is in this context that we use dimensionality reduction techniques to speed up the decision-making process. Dimensionality reduction techniques can be categorized as Feature Selection and Feature Extraction Techniques. In this paper we compare the two categories of dimensionality reduction techniques. Feature selection has been implemented using the Information Gain and Goodman–Kruskal measure. Principal Component Analysis has been used for Feature Extraction. In order to compare the accuracy of the methods, we have also implemented a classifier using back-propagation neural network. In general, it is found that feature extraction methods are more accurate than feature selection methods in the framework of credit risk analysis.