Sensor (group feature) selection with controlled redundancy in a connectionist framework.

For many applications, to reduce the processing time and the cost of decision making, we need to reduce the number of sensors, where each sensor produces a set of features. This sensor selection problem is a generalized feature selection problem. Here, we first present a sensor (group-feature) selection scheme based on Multi-Layered Perceptron Networks. This scheme sometimes selects redundant groups of features. So, we propose a selection scheme which can control the level of redundancy between the selected groups. The idea is general and can be used with any learning scheme. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of our scheme on several data sets. In this context, we define different measures of sensor dependency (dependency between groups of features). We have also presented an alternative learning scheme which is more effective than our old scheme. The proposed scheme is also adapted to radial basis function (RBS) network. The advantages of our scheme are threefold. It looks at all the groups together and hence can exploit nonlinear interaction between groups, if any. Our scheme can simultaneously select useful groups as well as learn the underlying system. The level of redundancy among groups can also be controlled.