[R] Recursive Feature Elimination with SVM

[Priyanka Purkayastha]

I have a dataset (data) with 700 rows and 7000 columns. I am trying to do
recursive feature selection with the SVM model. A quick google search
helped me get a code for a recursive search with SVM. However, I am unable
to understand the first part of the code, How do I introduce my dataset in
the code?

If the dataset is a matrix, named data. Please give me an example for
recursive feature selection with SVM. Bellow is the code I got for
recursive feature search.

    svmrfeFeatureRanking = function(x,y){

    #Checking for the variables
    stopifnot(!is.null(x) == TRUE, !is.null(y) == TRUE)

    n = ncol(x)
    survivingFeaturesIndexes = seq_len(n)
    featureRankedList = vector(length=n)
    rankedFeatureIndex = n

    while(length(survivingFeaturesIndexes)>0){
    #train the support vector machine
    svmModel = svm(x[, survivingFeaturesIndexes], y, cost = 10,
cachesize=500,
                scale=FALSE, type="C-classification", kernel="linear" )

    #compute the weight vector
    w = t(svmModel$coefs)%*%svmModel$SV

    #compute ranking criteria
    rankingCriteria = w * w

    #rank the features
    ranking = sort(rankingCriteria, index.return = TRUE)$ix

    #update feature ranked list
    featureRankedList[rankedFeatureIndex] =
survivingFeaturesIndexes[ranking[1]]
    rankedFeatureIndex = rankedFeatureIndex - 1

    #eliminate the feature with smallest ranking criterion
    (survivingFeaturesIndexes = survivingFeaturesIndexes[-ranking[1]])}
    return (featureRankedList)}



I tried taking an idea from the above code and incorporate the idea in my
code as shown below

    library(e1071)
    library(caret)

    data<- read.csv("matrix.csv", header = TRUE)

    x <- data
    y <- as.factor(data$Class)

    svmrfeFeatureRanking = function(x,y){

      #Checking for the variables
      stopifnot(!is.null(x) == TRUE, !is.null(y) == TRUE)

      n = ncol(x)
      survivingFeaturesIndexes = seq_len(n)
      featureRankedList = vector(length=n)
      rankedFeatureIndex = n

      while(length(survivingFeaturesIndexes)>0){
        #train the support vector machine
        svmModel = svm(x[, survivingFeaturesIndexes], y, cross=10,cost =
10, type="C-classification", kernel="linear" )

        #compute the weight vector
        w = t(svmModel$coefs)%*%svmModel$SV

        #compute ranking criteria
        rankingCriteria = w * w

        #rank the features
        ranking = sort(rankingCriteria, index.return = TRUE)$ix

        #update feature ranked list
        featureRankedList[rankedFeatureIndex] =
survivingFeaturesIndexes[ranking[1]]
        rankedFeatureIndex = rankedFeatureIndex - 1

        #eliminate the feature with smallest ranking criterion
        (survivingFeaturesIndexes = survivingFeaturesIndexes[-ranking[1]])}

      return (featureRankedList)}

But couldn't do anything at the stage "update feature ranked list"
Please guide

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