Due to the fact that conventional heuristic attribute reduction algorithms are poor in running efficiency and difficult in accomplishing the co-evolutionary reduction mechanism in the decision table, an adaptive multicascade attribute reduction algorithm based on quantum-inspired mixed co-evolution is proposed. First, a novel and efficient self- adaptive quantum rotation angle strategy is designed to direct the participating populations to mutual adaptive evolution and to accelerate convergence speed. Then, a multicascade model of cooperative and competitive mixed co-evolution is adopted to decompose the evolutionary attribute species into subpopulations according to their historical performance records, which can increase the diversity of subpopulations and select some elitist individuals so as to strengthen the sharing ability of their searching experience. So the global optimization reduction set can be obtained quickly. The experimental results show that, compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm can achieve a higher performance for attribute reduction, and it can be considered as a more competitive heuristic algorithm on the efficiency and accuracy of minimum attribute reduction.
