MINERVA: Mutual Information Neural Estimation for Supervised Feature Selection

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Muvunza, Taurai, Kraev, Egor, Planell-Morell, Pere, Shestopaloff, Alexander Y.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Muvunza, Taurai
Kraev, Egor
Planell-Morell, Pere
Shestopaloff, Alexander Y.
author_facet Muvunza, Taurai
Kraev, Egor
Planell-Morell, Pere
Shestopaloff, Alexander Y.
contents Existing feature filters rely on statistical pair-wise dependence metrics to model feature-target relationships, but this approach may fail when the target depends on higher-order feature interactions rather than individual contributions. We introduce Mutual Information Neural Estimation Regularized Vetting Algorithm (MINERVA), a novel approach to supervised feature selection based on neural estimation of mutual information between features and targets. We paramaterize the approximation of mutual information with neural networks and perform feature selection using a carefully designed loss function augmented with sparsity-inducing regularizers. Our method is implemented in a two-stage process to decouple representation learning from feature selection, ensuring better generalization and a more accurate expression of feature importance. We present examples of ubiquitous dependency structures that are rarely captured in literature and show that our proposed method effectively captures these complex feature-target relationships by evaluating feature subsets as an ensemble. Experimental results on synthetic and real-life fraud datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our method and its ability to perform exact solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02610
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MINERVA: Mutual Information Neural Estimation for Supervised Feature Selection
Muvunza, Taurai
Kraev, Egor
Planell-Morell, Pere
Shestopaloff, Alexander Y.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.6; I.5.1; G.3
Existing feature filters rely on statistical pair-wise dependence metrics to model feature-target relationships, but this approach may fail when the target depends on higher-order feature interactions rather than individual contributions. We introduce Mutual Information Neural Estimation Regularized Vetting Algorithm (MINERVA), a novel approach to supervised feature selection based on neural estimation of mutual information between features and targets. We paramaterize the approximation of mutual information with neural networks and perform feature selection using a carefully designed loss function augmented with sparsity-inducing regularizers. Our method is implemented in a two-stage process to decouple representation learning from feature selection, ensuring better generalization and a more accurate expression of feature importance. We present examples of ubiquitous dependency structures that are rarely captured in literature and show that our proposed method effectively captures these complex feature-target relationships by evaluating feature subsets as an ensemble. Experimental results on synthetic and real-life fraud datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our method and its ability to perform exact solutions.
title MINERVA: Mutual Information Neural Estimation for Supervised Feature Selection
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.6; I.5.1; G.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02610