matFR: a MATLAB toolbox for feature ranking.

Abstract

Nowadays, it is feasible to collect massive features for quantitative representation and precision medicine, and thus, automatic ranking to figure out the most informative and discriminative ones becomes increasingly important. To address this issue, 42 feature ranking (FR) methods are integrated to form a MATLAB toolbox (matFR). The methods apply mutual information, statistical analysis, structure clustering and other principles to estimate the relative importance of features in specific measure spaces. Specifically, these methods are summarized, and an example shows how to apply a FR method to sort mammographic breast lesion features. The toolbox is easy to use and flexible to integrate additional methods. Importantly, it provides a tool to compare, investigate and interpret the features selected for various applications. The toolbox is freely available at http://github.com/NicoYuCN/matFR. A tutorial and an example with a dataset are provided.