This article appoints a novel model of rough set approximations (RSA), namely, rough set approximation models build on containment neighborhoods RSA (CRSA), that generalize the traditional notions of RSA and obtain valuable consequences by minifying the boundary areas. To justify this extension, it is integrated with the binary version of the honey badger optimization (HBO) algorithm as a feature selection (FS) approach. The main target of using this extension is to assess the quality of selected features. To evaluate the performance of BHBO based on CRSA, a set of ten datasets is used. In addition, the results of BHOB are compared with other well-known FS approaches. The results show the superiority of CRSA over the traditional RS approximations. In addition, they illustrate the high ability of BHBO to improve the classification accuracy overall the compared methods in terms of performance metrics.