A Combined Approach To Detect Key Variables In Thick Data Analytics.

In machine learning one of the strategic tasks is the selection of only significant variables as predictors for the response(s). In this paper an approach is proposed which consists in the application of permutation tests on the candidate predictor variables in the aim of identifying only the most informative ones. Several industrial problems may benefit from such an approach, and an application in the field of chemical analysis is presented. A comparison is carried out between the approach proposed and Lasso, that is one of the most common alternatives for feature selection available in the literature.