abstract = "Genetic programming (GP), as a predictive data
analytic tool, has difficulties dealing with
high-dimensional problems. Therefore, some GP variants
have been proposed for this type of problem, such as
multi-stage GP (MSGP). Filter-based feature selection
is commonly used in the literature for various machine
learning purposes. However, its application for GP is
overlooked due to GP's capability to operate as a
wrapper-based feature selection while trying to find an
optimal expression of the target variable via a
functional combination of predictors. The effectiveness
of wrapper- and filer-based feature selection
approaches in machine learning has been the subject of
a long-standing debate in the literature. This study
aims to introduce an efficient feature selection
approach and couple it with MSGP in order to handle
high-dimensional problems. In addition, the stages of
the GP are systematically ordered based on the
variables' information. The proposed approach is tested
against five real high-dimensional datasets. The
results show that GP's inherent wrapper feature
selection ability can be advanced further by using a
filter-based feature selection approach to shrink the
search space, which results in improving computational
costs, expression complexity and the accuracy of
MSGP.",