aspg-28-2546-1793997846 20261106204406 American Scientific Publishing Group admin@americaspg.com American Scientific Publishing Group Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Metaheuristics JAIM 2833-5597 2024 7 1 Mohamed Ziad Ali Department of Communications and Electronics, Delta Higher Institute of Engineering and Technology (DHIET), Mansoura 35111, Egypt Abdulrahman Abdullah Department of Communications and Electronics, Delta Higher Institute of Engineering and Technology (DHIET), Mansoura 35111, Egypt Ahmed Mohamed Zaki Computer Science and Intelligent Systems Research Center, Blacksburg 24060, Virginia, USA Faris H. Rizk Computer Science and Intelligent Systems Research Center, Blacksburg 24060, Virginia, USA Marwa M. Eid Faculty of Artificial Intelligence, Delta University for Science and Technology, Mansoura 35111, Egypt Elsayed M. El-Kenway Faculty of Artificial Intelligence, Delta University for Science and Technology, Mansoura 35111, Egypt This review examines the role of feature selection in data analytics and its growing use in data-intensive fields, including cybersecurity, healthcare, and finance. It surveys foundational concepts and current applications, with particular attention to reducing dimensionality and improving the interpretation of complex relationships in healthcare data. The review covers optimization-based methods, swarm intelligence, and feature-selection approaches for heart-disease diagnosis, intrusion detection, and other classification tasks. It also discusses hybrid Ant Colony Optimization and Grey Wolf Optimizer methods, alongside the Improved Salp Swarm Algorithm (ISSA). The reviewed studies illustrate that feature selection is more than a preprocessing step: it is an important component of machine learning and data science that can improve model efficiency, interpretability, and classification performance. Challenges and open research directions are summarized to support future work. 2024 39 44 2546 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 10.54216/JAIM.070105 https://americaspg.com/journal/28/article/2546 https://americaspg.com/storage/articles/manuscripts/01M5J2WQ95XMSWGAP0374QQP1X.pdf