Ranking of attributes-comparative study based on data from stylometric domain

The area of feature selection methods constantly expands along with the development of artificial intelligence domain, and has great impact on almost every field, whenever data is processed and explored. The paper presents research where a ranking method was proposed, inspired by an approach which comes from an algorithm for induction of decision rules. The ranking procedure was based on calculation of standard deviation for attributes, taking into account assigned class labels. This method was compared with another ranking mechanism, a modified version of popular Relief algorithm, with incorporating characteristics of variables by supervised discretisation. Comparison of obtained results included the aspect of knowledge representation as well as the perspective of the accuracy for constructed rule-based classifiers. The experiments were performed on datasets from stylometry domain, where authorship attribution was considered as a classification task, and stylometric descriptors as characteristic features defining writing styles of authors.