Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Metaheuristics JAIM 2833-5597 10.54216/JAIM https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/2546 2022 2022 Department of Communications and Electronics, Delta Higher Institute of Engineering and Technology (DHIET), Mansoura 35111, Egypt Mohamed Mohamed Department of Communications and Electronics, Delta Higher Institute of Engineering and Technology (DHIET), Mansoura 35111, Egypt Abdulrahman Abdullah Computer Science and Intelligent Systems Research Center, Blacksburg 24060, Virginia, USA Ahmed Mohamed Zaki Computer Science and Intelligent Systems Research Center, Blacksburg 24060, Virginia, USA Faris H. Rizk Faculty of Artificial Intelligence, Delta University for Science and Technology, Mansoura 35111, Egypt Marwa M. Eid Faculty of Artificial Intelligence, Delta University for Science and Technology, Mansoura 35111, Egypt Elsayed M. El El-Kenway The feature selection area in data analytics is explored through a comprehensive literature review, and the increasing areas that have a data dependency problem and are being resolved with feature selection are highlighted. Review topics of this course cover the foundations to present use cases, for example, cybersecurity, healthcare, and finance. Particularly crucially for the healthcare domain, it reduces the dimensionality and elucidates complex causal links. The further investigation overlaps contemporary techniques, including optimization-based methods, swarm intelligence and algorithms for the diagnosis of heart diseases. The conclusion builds on the practical assessment and underlines research gaps, serving as a basis to set a diversified technological review. This also exhibits new techniques that have released their efficiency in classification environments, for example, hybrid Ant Colony Optimization and the Gray Wolf Optimizer. The ISSA algorithm stands out as a swarm intelligence technique that is best among others. The paper concludes by demonstrating that feature selection goes beyond the preprocessing stage, but it instead stands as a vital part of the fields of machine learning and data science and thus aids the researchers in both retrospective analysis and forthcoming projects. 2024 2024 67 77 10.54216/JAIM.070105 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/28/show/2546