GD: a measure based on information theory for attribute selection

Abstract

In this work a measure called GD is presented for attribute selection. This measure is defined between an attribute set and a class and corresponds to a generalization of the Mántaras distance that allows to detect the interdependencies between attributes. In the same way, the proposed measure allows to order the attributes by importance in the definition of the concept. This measure does not exhibit a noticeable bias in favor of attributes with many values. The quality of the selected attributes using the GD measure is tested by means of different comparisons with other two attribute selection methods over 19 datasets.