Ferreira, ArturFigueiredo, Mário2024-03-272024-03-272024Ferreira, A. and Figueiredo, M. (2024). A Mutual Information Based Discretization-Selection Technique. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - ICPRAM; ISBN 978-989-758-684-2; ISSN 2184-4313, SciTePress, pages 436-443. DOI: 10.5220/0012467300003654978-989-758-684-22184-4313http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/17230In machine learning (ML) and data mining (DM) one often has to resort to data pre-processing techniques to achieve adequate data representations. Among these techniques, we find feature discretization (FD) and feature selection (FS), with many available methods for each one. The use of FD and FS techniques improves the data representation for ML and DM tasks. However, these techniques are usually applied in an independent way, that is, we may use a FD technique but not a FS technique or the opposite case. Using both FD and FS techniques in sequence, may not produce the most adequate results. In this paper, we propose a supervised discretization-selection technique; the discretization step is done in an incremental approach and keeps information regarding the features and the number of bits allocated per feature. Then, we apply a selection criterion based upon the discretization bins, yielding a discretized and dimensionality reduced dataset. We evaluate our technique on different typ es of data and in most cases the discretized and reduced version of the data is the most suited version, achieving better classification performance, as compared to the use of the original features.engBit AllocationClassificationExplainability,Feature DiscretizationFeature SelectionMachine LearningMutual InformationSupervised Learningjournal article10.5220/0012467300003654