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 MDβΟ2 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