A Multi-label Text Classification Framework: Using Supervised and Unsupervised Feature Selection Strategy

Text classification, the task of metadata to documents, needs a person to take significant time and effort. Since online-generated contents are explosively growing, it becomes a challenge for manually annotating with large scale and unstructured data. Recently, various state-or-art text mining methods have been applied to classification process based on the keywords extraction. However, when using these keywords as features in the classification task, it is common that the number of feature dimensions is large. In addition, how to select keywords from documents as features in the classification task is a big challenge. Especially, when using traditional machine learning algorithms in big data, the computation time is very long. On the other hand, about 80% of real data is unstructured and non-labeled in the real world. The conventional supervised feature selection methods cannot be directly used in selecting entities from massive data. Usually, statistical strategies are utilized to extract features from unlabeled data for classification tasks according to their importance scores. We propose a novel method to extract key features effectively before feeding them into the classification assignment. Another challenge in the text classification is the multi-label problem, the assignment of multiple non-exclusive labels to documents. This problem makes text classification more complicated compared with a single label classification. For the above issues, we develop a framework for extracting data and reducing data dimension to solve the multi-label problem on labeled and unlabeled datasets. In order to reduce data dimension, we develop a hybrid feature selection method that extracts meaningful features according to the importance of each feature. The Word2Vec is applied to represent each document by a feature vector for the document categorization for the big dataset. The unsupervised approach is used to extract features from real online-generated data for text classification. Our unsupervised feature selection method is applied to extract depression symptoms from social media such as Twitter. In the future, these depression symptoms will be used for depression self-screening and diagnosis

Heuristic ensembles of filters for accurate and reliable feature selection

Feature selection has become increasingly important in data mining in recent years. However, the accuracy and stability of feature selection methods vary considerably when used individually, and yet no rule exists to indicate which one should be used for a particular dataset. Thus, an ensemble method that combines the outputs of several individual feature selection methods appears to be a promising approach to address the issue and hence is investigated in this research. This research aims to develop an effective ensemble that can improve the accuracy and stability of the feature selection. We proposed a novel heuristic ensemble of filters (HEF). It combines two types of filters: subset filters and ranking filters with a heuristic consensus algorithm in order to utilise the strength of each type. The ensemble is tested on ten benchmark datasets and its performance is evaluated by two stability measures and three classifiers. The experimental results demonstrate that HEF improves the stability and accuracy of the selected features and in most cases outperforms the other ensemble algorithms, individual filters and the full feature set. The research on the HEF algorithm is extended in several dimensions; including more filter members, three novel schemes of mean rank aggregation with partial lists, and three novel schemes for a weighted heuristic ensemble of filters. However, the experimental results demonstrate that adding weight to filters in HEF does not achieve the expected improvement in accuracy, but increases time and space complexity, and clearly decreases stability. Therefore, the core ensemble algorithm (HEF) is demonstrated to be not just simpler but also more reliable and consistent than the later more complicated and weighted ensembles. In addition, we investigated how to use data in feature selection, using ALL or PART of it. Systematic experiments with thirty five synthetic and benchmark real-world datasets were carried out