Feature Selection and Reduction for Text Classification

Question

I am currently working on a project, a simple sentiment analyzer such that there will be 2 and 3 classes in separate cases. I am using a corpus that is pretty rich in the means of unique words (around 200.000). I used bag-of-words method for feature selection and to reduce the number of unique features, an elimination is done due to a threshold value of frequency of occurrence. The final set of features includes around 20.000 features, which is actually a 90% decrease, but not enough for intended accuracy of test-prediction. I am using LibSVM and SVM-light in turn for training and prediction (both linear and RBF kernel) and also Python and Bash in general.

The highest accuracy observed so far is around 75% and I need at least 90%. This is the case for binary classification. For multi-class training, the accuracy falls to ~60%. I need at least 90% at both cases and can not figure how to increase it: via optimizing training parameters or via optimizing feature selection?

I have read articles about feature selection in text classification and what I found is that three different methods are used, which have actually a clear correlation among each other. These methods are as follows:

• Frequency approach of bag-of-words (BOW)
• Information Gain (IG)
• X^2 Statistic (CHI)

The first method is already the one I use, but I use it very simply and need guidance for a better use of it in order to obtain high enough accuracy. I am also lacking knowledge about practical implementations of IG and CHI and looking for any help to guide me in that way.

Thanks a lot, and if you need any additional info for help, just let me know.

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• @larsmans: Frequency Threshold: I am looking for the occurrences of unique words in examples, such that if a word is occurring in different examples frequently enough, it is included in the feature set as a unique feature.

• @TheManWithNoName: First of all thanks for your effort in explaining the general concerns of document classification. I examined and experimented all the methods you bring forward and others. I found Proportional Difference (PD) method the best for feature selection, where features are uni-grams and Term Presence (TP) for the weighting (I didn't understand why you tagged Term-Frequency-Inverse-Document-Frequency (TF-IDF) as an indexing method, I rather consider it as a feature weighting approach). Pre-processing is also an important aspect for this task as you mentioned. I used certain types of string elimination for refining the data as well as morphological parsing and stemming. Also note that I am working on Turkish, which has different characteristics compared to English. Finally, I managed to reach ~88% accuracy (f-measure) for binary classification and ~84% for multi-class. These values are solid proofs of the success of the model I used. This is what I have done so far. Now working on clustering and reduction models, have tried LDA and LSI and moving on to moVMF and maybe spherical models (LDA + moVMF), which seems to work better on corpus those have objective nature, like news corpus. If you have any information and guidance on these issues, I will appreciate. I need info especially to setup an interface (python oriented, open-source) between feature space dimension reduction methods (LDA, LSI, moVMF etc.) and clustering methods (k-means, hierarchical etc.).

Catharina

What kind of frequency threshold are you using? – Esbensen

just a wild guess. your reduction already removed necessary information. SVM is quire good in handling a lot of dimensions. did you try bigger feature sets? what is the sample size you use in training? if you cannot train with more features, try to train the second most frequent 20.000 to verify there is no information left there. and the thirdmost frequent words. – Endoparasite

@clancularius, if possible can you explain in little more detail on what techniques you used for feature extraction and feature selection. I am also working on a text classification problem where I am not move the accuracy beyond 61%. – Letters

Answer 1

This is probably a bit late to the table, but...

As Bee points out and you are already aware, the use of SVM as a classifier is wasted if you have already lost the information in the stages prior to classification. However, the process of text classification requires much more that just a couple of stages and each stage has significant effects on the result. Therefore, before looking into more complicated feature selection measures there are a number of much simpler possibilities that will typically require much lower resource consumption.

Do you pre-process the documents before performing tokensiation/representation into the bag-of-words format? Simply removing stop words or punctuation may improve accuracy considerably.

Have you considered altering your bag-of-words representation to use, for example, word pairs or n-grams instead? You may find that you have more dimensions to begin with but that they condense down a lot further and contain more useful information.

Its also worth noting that dimension reduction is feature selection/feature extraction. The difference is that feature selection reduces the dimensions in a univariate manner, i.e. it removes terms on an individual basis as they currently appear without altering them, whereas feature extraction (which I think Ben Allison is referring to) is multivaritate, combining one or more single terms together to produce higher orthangonal terms that (hopefully) contain more information and reduce the feature space.

Regarding your use of document frequency, are you merely using the probability/percentage of documents that contain a term or are you using the term densities found within the documents? If category one has only 10 douments and they each contain a term once, then category one is indeed associated with the document. However, if category two has only 10 documents that each contain the same term a hundred times each, then obviously category two has a much higher relation to that term than category one. If term densities are not taken into account this information is lost and the fewer categories you have the more impact this loss with have. On a similar note, it is not always prudent to only retain terms that have high frequencies, as they may not actually be providing any useful information. For example if a term appears a hundred times in every document, then it is considered a noise term and, while it looks important, there is no practical value in keeping it in your feature set.

Also how do you index the data, are you using the Vector Space Model with simple boolean indexing or a more complicated measure such as TF-IDF? Considering the low number of categories in your scenario a more complex measure will be beneficial as they can account for term importance for each category in relation to its importance throughout the entire dataset.

Personally I would experiment with some of the above possibilities first and then consider tweaking the feature selection/extraction with a (or a combination of) complex equations if you need an additional performance boost.

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Additional

Based on the new information, it sounds as though you are on the right track and 84%+ accuracy (F1 or BEP - precision and recall based for multi-class problems) is generally considered very good for most datasets. It might be that you have successfully acquired all information rich features from the data already, or that a few are still being pruned.

Having said that, something that can be used as a predictor of how good aggressive dimension reduction may be for a particular dataset is 'Outlier Count' analysis, which uses the decline of Information Gain in outlying features to determine how likely it is that information will be lost during feature selection. You can use it on the raw and/or processed data to give an estimate of how aggressively you should aim to prune features (or unprune them as the case may be). A paper describing it can be found here:

Paper with Outlier Count information

With regards to describing TF-IDF as an indexing method, you are correct in it being a feature weighting measure, but I consider it to be used mostly as part of the indexing process (though it can also be used for dimension reduction). The reasoning for this is that some measures are better aimed toward feature selection/extraction, while others are preferable for feature weighting specifically in your document vectors (i.e. the indexed data). This is generally due to dimension reduction measures being determined on a per category basis, whereas index weighting measures tend to be more document orientated to give superior vector representation.

In respect to LDA, LSI and moVMF, I'm afraid I have too little experience of them to provide any guidance. Unfortunately I've also not worked with Turkish datasets or the python language.

Disrespectable

I answered you in my question above. Please take a look. Thanks for your answer btw. – Catharina

I've updated my answer based on your new information. I'm afraid I can't help much more at the moment as I'm nearing the deadline for my PhD thesis... which ironically is based on streamlining, interfacing and standardising the stages used in Text Categorisation! If I ever get it done I'll try to remember to selflessly promote it in this question. – Disrespectable

I appreciate your effort and thank you. I will have a look at the paper you included and try to make a use of it. Clustering is hell of a problem and much more ambiguous compared to classification, thus I am depending on luck from now on =) I wish you a successful thesis by the way, have a nice day. – Catharina

@TheManWithNoName: Great Answer! Loved Reading it. – Tubercular

Answer 2

I would recommend dimensionality reduction instead of feature selection. Consider either singular value decomposition, principal component analysis, or even better considering it's tailored for bag-of-words representations, Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This will allow you to notionally retain representations that include all words, but to collapse them to fewer dimensions by exploiting similarity (or even synonymy-type) relations between them.

All these methods have fairly standard implementations that you can get access to and run---if you let us know which language you're using, I or someone else will be able to point you in the right direction.

Themistocles

Thanks for your reply in the first place. I am using python and bash scripts. I have had a quick search on singular value decomposition, principal component analysis and specifically LDA, but I need time in order to understand how to use them. I agree with you, dimensionality reduction seems to be an efficient choice for my task, however it is not clear for me whether I need to generate my own reduction algorithm based on the theoretical fundamentals of those methods or it is enough to use an already existing implementation (which I do not know any)? – Catharina

It's more than enough to use an existing implementation. If you're using Python, there's gensim for LDA(radimrehurek.com/gensim), or maplotlib.mlab has an implementation of SVD/PCA: matplotlib.org/api/mlab_api.html#matplotlib.mlab.PCA. There should be some simple examples with both so you can see how they work. – Themistocles

Thank you a lot, I will have a look and inform you about the improvements. – Catharina

Answer 3

There's a python library for feature selection TextFeatureSelection. This library provides discriminatory power in the form of score for each word token, bigram, trigram etc.

Those who are aware of feature selection methods in machine learning, it is based on filter method and provides ML engineers required tools to improve the classification accuracy in their NLP and deep learning models. It has 4 methods namely Chi-square, Mutual information, Proportional difference and Information gain to help select words as features before being fed into machine learning classifiers.

from TextFeatureSelection import TextFeatureSelection

#Multiclass classification problem
input_doc_list=['i am very happy','i just had an awesome weekend','this is a very difficult terrain to trek. i wish i stayed back at home.','i just had lunch','Do you want chips?']
target=['Positive','Positive','Negative','Neutral','Neutral']
fsOBJ=TextFeatureSelection(target=target,input_doc_list=input_doc_list)
result_df=fsOBJ.getScore()
print(result_df)

#Binary classification
input_doc_list=['i am content with this location','i am having the time of my life','you cannot learn machine learning without linear algebra','i want to go to mars']
target=[1,1,0,1]
fsOBJ=TextFeatureSelection(target=target,input_doc_list=input_doc_list)
result_df=fsOBJ.getScore()
print(result_df)

Edit:

It now has genetic algorithm for feature selection as well.

from TextFeatureSelection import TextFeatureSelectionGA
#Input documents: doc_list
#Input labels: label_list
getGAobj=TextFeatureSelectionGA(percentage_of_token=60)
best_vocabulary=getGAobj.getGeneticFeatures(doc_list=doc_list,label_list=label_list)

Edit2

There is another method nowTextFeatureSelectionEnsemble, which combines feature selection while ensembling. It does feature selection for base models through document frequency thresholds. At ensemble layer, it uses genetic algorithm to identify best combination of base models and keeps only those.

from TextFeatureSelection import TextFeatureSelectionEnsemble 

imdb_data=pd.read_csv('../input/IMDB Dataset.csv')
le = LabelEncoder()
imdb_data['labels'] = le.fit_transform(imdb_data['sentiment'].values)

#convert raw text and labels to python list
doc_list=imdb_data['review'].tolist()
label_list=imdb_data['labels'].tolist()

#Initialize parameter for TextFeatureSelectionEnsemble and start training
gaObj=TextFeatureSelectionEnsemble(doc_list,label_list,n_crossvalidation=2,pickle_path='/home/user/folder/',average='micro',base_model_list=['LogisticRegression','RandomForestClassifier','ExtraTreesClassifier','KNeighborsClassifier'])
best_columns=gaObj.doTFSE()`

Check the project for details: https://pypi.org/project/TextFeatureSelection/

Simone

Answer 4

Linear svm is recommended for high dimensional features. Based on my experience the ultimate limitation of SVM accuracy depends on the positive and negative "features". You can do a grid search (or in the case of linear svm you can just search for the best cost value) to find the optimal parameters for maximum accuracy, but in the end you are limited by the separability of your feature-sets. The fact that you are not getting 90% means that you still have some work to do finding better features to describe your members of the classes.

Oisin

@larsmans This is already what I ask for. As I explained above, I am looking for a better "feature selection" method, which you advise me to do. I already used grid function for parameter selection before training my data set, however the parameter value iteration ended up with parameter values, those won't let me to go higher than ~70-75% prediction accuracy. Yes, I need to select my features to obtain better accuracy results, but how? Do you know how to use IG and CHI feature selection methods? Do you know how to optimize the implementation of term-frequency method? – Catharina

Answer 5

I'm sure this is way too late to be of use to the poster, but perhaps it will be useful to someone else. The chi-squared approach to feature reduction is pretty simple to implement. Assuming BoW binary classification into classes C1 and C2, for each feature f in candidate_features calculate the freq of f in C1; calculate total words C1; repeat calculations for C2; Calculate a chi-sqaure determine filter candidate_features based on whether p-value is below a certain threshold (e.g. p < 0.05). A tutorial using Python and nltk can been seen here: http://streamhacker.com/2010/06/16/text-classification-sentiment-analysis-eliminate-low-information-features/ (though if I remember correctly, I believe the author incorrectly applies this technique to his test data, which biases the reported results).

Tusker