Using ambiguity measure feature selection algorithm for support vector machine classifier

Abstract

With the ever-increasing number of documents on the web, digital libraries, news sources, etc., the need of a text classifier that can classify massive amount of data is becoming more critical and difficult. The major problem in text classification is the high dimensionality of feature space. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is shown to perform consistently better than other text classification algorithms. However, the time taken for training a SVM model is more than other algorithms. We explore the use of the Ambiguity Measure (AM) feature selection method that uses only the most unambiguous keywords to predict the category of a document. Our analysis shows that AM reduces the training time by more than 50% than the scenario when no feature selection is used, while maintaining the accuracy of the text classifier equivalent to or better than using the whole feature set. We empirically show the effectiveness of our approach in outperforming seven different feature selection methods using two standard benchmark datasets.