Toward Optimal Feature Selection in Naive Bayes for Text Categorization

Automated feature selection is important for text categorization to reduce the feature size and to speed up the learning process of classifiers. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient feature selection framework based on the Information Theory, which aims to rank the features with their discriminative capacity for classification. We first revisit two information measures: Kullback-Leibler divergence and Jeffreys divergence for binary hypothesis testing, and analyze their asymptotic properties relating to type I and type II errors of a Bayesian classifier. We then introduce a new divergence measure, called Jeffreys-Multi-Hypothesis (JMH) divergence, to measure multi-distribution divergence for multi-class classification. Based on the JMH-divergence, we develop two efficient feature selection methods, termed maximum discrimination ($MD$) and $MD-\chi^2$ methods, for text categorization. The promising results of extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.Comment: This paper has been submitted to the IEEE Trans. Knowledge and Data Engineering. 14 pages, 5 figure

Toward optimal feature selection using ranking methods and classification algorithms

We presented a comparison between several feature ranking methods used on two real datasets. We considered six ranking methods that can be divided into two broad categories: statistical and entropy-based. Four supervised learning algorithms are adopted to build models, namely, IB1, Naive Bayes, C4.5 decision tree and the RBF network. We showed that the selection of ranking methods could be important for classification accuracy. In our experiments, ranking methods with different supervised learning algorithms give quite different results for balanced accuracy. Our cases confirm that, in order to be sure that a subset of features giving the highest accuracy has been selected, the use of many different indices is recommended

EEF: Exponentially Embedded Families with Class-Specific Features for Classification

In this letter, we present a novel exponentially embedded families (EEF) based classification method, in which the probability density function (PDF) on raw data is estimated from the PDF on features. With the PDF construction, we show that class-specific features can be used in the proposed classification method, instead of a common feature subset for all classes as used in conventional approaches. We apply the proposed EEF classifier for text categorization as a case study and derive an optimal Bayesian classification rule with class-specific feature selection based on the Information Gain (IG) score. The promising performance on real-life data sets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach and indicates its wide potential applications.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, to be published in IEEE Signal Processing Letter. IEEE Signal Processing Letter, 201

Automatic Classification of Text Databases through Query Probing

Many text databases on the web are "hidden" behind search interfaces, and their documents are only accessible through querying. Search engines typically ignore the contents of such search-only databases. Recently, Yahoo-like directories have started to manually organize these databases into categories that users can browse to find these valuable resources. We propose a novel strategy to automate the classification of search-only text databases. Our technique starts by training a rule-based document classifier, and then uses the classifier's rules to generate probing queries. The queries are sent to the text databases, which are then classified based on the number of matches that they produce for each query. We report some initial exploratory experiments that show that our approach is promising to automatically characterize the contents of text databases accessible on the web.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Weighted Heuristic Ensemble of Filters

Feature selection has become increasingly important in data mining in recent years due to the rapid increase in the dimensionality of big data. However, the reliability and consistency of feature selection methods (filters) vary considerably on different data and no single filter performs consistently well under various conditions. Therefore, feature selection ensemble has been investigated recently to provide more reliable and effective results than any individual one but all the existing feature selection ensemble treat the feature selection methods equally regardless of their performance. In this paper, we present a novel framework which applies weighted feature selection ensemble through proposing a systemic way of adding different weights to the feature selection methods-filters. Also, we investigate how to determine the appropriate weight for each filter in an ensemble. Experiments based on ten benchmark datasets show that theoretically and intuitively adding more weight to ‘good filters’ should lead to better results but in reality it is very uncertain. This assumption was found to be correct for some examples in our experiment. However, for other situations, filters which had been assumed to perform well showed bad performance leading to even worse results. Therefore adding weight to filters might not achieve much in accuracy terms, in addition to increasing complexity, time consumption and clearly decreasing the stability

FSMJ: Feature Selection with Maximum Jensen-Shannon Divergence for Text Categorization

In this paper, we present a new wrapper feature selection approach based on Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence, termed feature selection with maximum JS-divergence (FSMJ), for text categorization. Unlike most existing feature selection approaches, the proposed FSMJ approach is based on real-valued features which provide more information for discrimination than binary-valued features used in conventional approaches. We show that the FSMJ is a greedy approach and the JS-divergence monotonically increases when more features are selected. We conduct several experiments on real-life data sets, compared with the state-of-the-art feature selection approaches for text categorization. The superior performance of the proposed FSMJ approach demonstrates its effectiveness and further indicates its wide potential applications on data mining.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation, 201