Feature selection has proven to be a valuable technique
in supervised learning for improving predictive
accuracy while reducing the number of
attributes considered in a task. We investigate
the potential for similar benefits in an unsupervised
learning task, conceptual clustering. The
issues raised in feature selection by the absence
of class labels are discussed and an implementation
of a sequential feature selection algorithm
based on an existing conceptual clustering system
is described. Additionally, we present a second
implementation which employs a technique for
improving the efficiency of the search for an optimal
description and compare the performance of
both algorithms.