“…Increasing demands for dimensionality reduction has broadly expanded research on feature selection into many fields, including pattern recognition, machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery. Feature selection, as a preprocessing step to machine learning, has proven to be very effective in reducing dimensionality, removing irrelevant data and improving comprehensibility (Langley et al, 1994;Liu and Motoda, 1998), and it has been used in different fields, like mechanics (Casimira et al, 2006), medicine (Palmerini et al, 2011), chemistry (Meydan and Sezerman, 2010) or chemioinformatics (Soto et al, 2009a).…”