Branch and bound based feature elimination for support vector machine based classification of hyperspectral images

Feature selection (FS) is a classical combinatorial problem in pattern recognition and data mining. It finds major importance in classification and regression scenarios. In this paper, a hybrid approach that combines branch-and-bound (BB) search with Bhattacharya distance based feature selection is presented for classifying hyperspectral data using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers. The performance of this hybrid approach is compared to another hybrid approach that uses genetic algorithm (GA) based feature selection in place of BB. It is also compared to baseline SVMs with no feature reduction. Experimental results using hyperspectral data show that under small sample size situations, BB approach performs better than GA and SVM with no feature selection.