Advancing Interaction-Sensitive Feature Selection: Novel Relief-Based Algorithms, Expanded Comparisons, and Recommendations for Biomedical Data Mining

As a precursor to high-dimensional biomedical data modeling, reliable feature selection can reduce computational expense, improve modeling performance, and yield simpler, more interpretable models. However, most filter-based feature selection methods struggle to detect feature interactions, while wrapper or embedded feature selection methods are computationally expensive. Relief-based algorithms (RBAs) are filter methods that are sensitive to feature interactions while mitigating these other limitations. This study (1) refactors, optimizes, and expands the scikit-rebate Python package with existing and newly proposed RBA variants and (2) conducts rigorous RBA benchmark comparisons across diverse genomic simulations. We expand scikit-rebate to include SWRF*, mu-Relief, and 5 novel RBA variants implementing alternative strategies for neighbor selection and feature scoring. All RBAs were evaluated to compare predictive feature ranking and runtime across simulated genomic datasets varying in sample size, number of features, heritability, and underlying association type (e.g. main effects and interactions). All RBAs, except mu-Relief, were proficient in detecting 2-way interactions in noisy data. RBAs utilizing 'far' scoring were best at detecting 2-way interactions - with MultiSWRFDB* top-performing - but were far less sensitive to main effects. SWRF, MultiSWRF, MultiSURF, and MultiSWRFDB yielded top performance across main effect and 2-way interaction datasets with MultiSWRFDB performing best when also considering 3-way interactions. Refactoring of scikit-rebate resulted in 10 to 35-fold reductions in RBA runtimes. The newly introduced RBAs were among the strongest performing, and by robustly retaining both main effects and 2-way epistatic interactions, these algorithms preserve predictive signals for downstream modeling.