A human body physiological feature selection algorithm based on filtering and improved clustering

PLoS One. 2018 Oct 31;13(10):e0204816. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204816. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Research: The body composition model is closely related to the physiological characteristics of the human body. At the same time there can be a large number of physiological characteristics, many of which may be redundant or irrelevant. In existing human physiological feature selection algorithms, it is difficult to overcome the impact that redundancy and irrelevancy may have on human body composition modeling. This suggests a role for selection algorithms, where human physiological characteristics are identified using a combination of filtering and improved clustering. To do this, a feature filtering method based on Hilbert-Schmidt dependency criteria is first of all used to eliminate irrelevant features. After this, it is possible to use improved Chameleon clustering to increase the combination of sub-clusters amongst the characteristics, thereby removing any redundant features to obtain a candidate feature set for human body composition modeling. Method We report here on the use of an algorithm to filter the characteristic parameters in INBODY770 (this paper used INBODY 770 as body composition analyzer.) measurement data, which has three commonly-used impedance bands (1 kHZ, 250 kHZ, 500 kHZ). This algorithm is able to filter out parameters that have a low correlation with body composition BFM. The algorithm is also able to draw upon improved clustering techniques to reduce the initial feature set from 29 parameters to 10 parameters for any parameters of the 250 kHZ band that remain after filtering. In addition, we also examined the impact of different sample sizes on feature selection.

Result: The proposed algorithm is able to remove irrelevant and redundant features and the resulting correlation between the model and the body composition (BFM which is a whole body fat evaluation can better assess the body's overall fat and muscle composition.) is 0.978, thereby providing an improved model for prediction with a relative error of less than 0.12.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Body Composition*
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Human Body*
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Fund 31401131 by Xiue Gao and Field fund for the Ministry of equipment development 6140131010116JW61001 and 61401310101 by Bo Chen.