Hands-On Genetic Algorithms with Python

Python problem representation

To encapsulate the feature selection process for the Zoo dataset classification task, we've created a Python class called Zoo. This class is contained in the zoo.py file, which is located at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Genetic-Algorithms-with-Python/blob/master/Chapter07/zoo.py.

The main parts of this class are highlighted as follows:

1. The __init__() method of the class loads the Zoo dataset from the web while skipping the first feature – animal name – as follows:

self.data = read_csv(self.DATASET_URL, header=None, usecols=range(1, 18))

2. Then, it separates the data to input features (first remaining 16 columns) and the resulting category (last column):

self.X = self.data.iloc[:, 0:16]self