Parallel Asynchronous Strategies for the Execution of Feature Selection Algorithms

• Tipo: Artigo em Revista Científica Internacional
• Data: 2018

Autores

Jorge Silva (Autor) Outra; Ana Aguiar (Autor) FEUP; Fernando Silva (Autor) FCUP

Revista

Título: International Journal of Parallel Programming

Vol. 46 Nº 2

Páginas: 252-283

ISSN: 0885-7458

Editora: Springer Nature

Indexação

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citações

Scopus - 3 Citações

INSPEC

Outras Informações

ID Authenticus: P-00N-9RM

DOI: 10.1007/s10766-017-0493-2

Abstract (EN): Reducing the dimensionality of datasets is a fundamental step in the task of building a classification model. Feature selection is the process of selecting a smaller subset of features from the original one in order to enhance the performance of the classification model. The problem is known to be NP-hard, and despite the existence of several algorithms there is not one that outperforms the others in all scenarios. Due to the complexity of the problem usually feature selection algorithms have to compromise the quality of their solutions in order to execute in a practicable amount of time. Parallel computing techniques emerge as a potential solution to tackle this problem. There are several approaches that already execute feature selection in parallel resorting to synchronous models. These are preferred due to their simplicity and capability to use with any feature selection algorithm. However, synchronous models implement pausing points during the execution flow, which decrease the parallel performance. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of executing feature selection algorithms in parallel using asynchronous models, and present a feature selection algorithm that favours these models. Furthermore, we present two strategies for an asynchronous parallel execution not only of our algorithm but of any other feature selection approach. The first strategy solves the problem using the distributed memory paradigm, while the second exploits the use of shared memory. We evaluate the parallel performance of our strategies using up to 32 cores. The results show near linear speedups for both strategies, with the shared memory strategy outperforming the distributed one. Additionally, we provide an example of adapting our strategies to execute the Sequential forward Search asynchronously. We further test this version versus a synchronous one. Our results revealed that, by using an asynchronous strategy, we are able to save an average of 7.5% of the execution time.

Idioma: Inglês

Tipo (Avaliação Docente): Científica

Nº de páginas: 32