Hepatitis C Stage Classification with hybridization of GA and Chi2 Feature Selection

In metaheuristic algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), initial population has a significant impact as it affects the time such algorithm takes to obtain an optimal solution to the given problem. In addition, it may influence the quality of the solution obtained. In the machine learning field, feature selection is an important process to attaining a good performance model; Genetic algorithm has been utilized for this purpose by scientists. However, the characteristics of Genetic algorithm, namely random initial population generation from a vector of feature elements, may influence solution and execution time. In this paper, the use of a statistical algorithm has been introduced (Chi2) for feature relevant checks where p-values of conditional independence were considered. Features with low p-values were discarded and subject relevant subset of features to Genetic Algorithm. This is to gain a level of certainty of the fitness of features randomly selected. An ensembled-based learning model for Hepatitis has been developed for Hepatitis C stage classification. 1385 samples were used using Egyptian-dataset obtained from UCI repository. The comparative evaluation confirms decreased in execution time and an increase in model performance accuracy from 56% to 63%.