Feature selection is a preprocessing technique, commonly used on high-dimensional data, that studies how to select a subset or list of attributes or variables that are used to construct models describing data. Wide data sets, which have a huge number of features but relatively few instances, introduce a novel challenge to feature selection. This installment of Trends & Controversies looks at several different ways of meeting this challenge.
This department is part of a special issue on Data Mining in Bioinformatics.