A Novel Binary Emperor Penguin Optimizer for Feature Selection Tasks

Nowadays, due to the increase in information resources, the number of parameters and complexity of feature vectors increases. Optimization methods offer more practical solutions instead of exact solutions for the solution of this problem. The Emperor Penguin Optimizer (EPO) is one of the highest performing meta-heuristic algorithms of recent times that imposed the gathering behavior of emperor penguins. It shows the superiority of its performance over a wide range of optimization problems thanks to its equal chance to each penguin and its fast convergence features. Although traditional EPO overcomes the optimization problems in continuous search space, many problems today shift to the binary search space. Therefore, in this study, using the power of traditional EPO, binary EPO (BEPO) is presented for the effective solution of binary-nature problems. BEPO algorithm uses binary search space instead of searching solutions like conventional EPO algorithm in continuous search space. For this purpose, the sigmoidal functions are preferred in determining the emperor positions. In addition, the boundaries of the search space remain constant by choosing binary operators. BEPO's performance is evaluated over twenty-nine benchmarking functions. Statistical evaluations are made to reveal the superiority of the BEPO algorithm. In addition, the performance of the BEPO algorithm was evaluated for the binary feature selection problem. The experimental results reveal that the BEPO algorithm outperforms the existing binary meta-heuristic algorithms in both tasks.