Avaliação de métodos não-supervisionados de seleção de atributos para mineração de textos / Evaluation of unsupervised feature selection methods for Text Mining

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

Feature selection is an activity sometimes necessary to obtain good results in machine learning tasks. In Text Mining, reducing the number of features in a text base is essential for the effectiveness of the process and the comprehensibility of the extracted knowledge, since it deals with high dimensionalities and sparse contexts. When dealing with contexts in which the text collection is not labeled, unsupervised methods for feature reduction have to be used. However, there arent any general predefined feature quality measures for unsupervised methods, therefore demanding a higher effort for its execution. So, this work broaches the unsupervised feature selection through an exploratory study of methods of this kind, comparing their efficacies in the reduction of the number of features in the Text Mining process. Ten methods are compared - Ranking by Term Frequency, Ranking by Document Frequency, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, Term Contribution, Term Variance, Term Variance Quality, Luhns Method, LuhnDF Method, Saltons Method and Zone-Scored Term Frequency - and two of them are proposed in this work - LuhnDF Method and Zone-Scored Term Frequency. The evaluation process is done in two ways, supervised, through the accuracy measure of four classifiers (C4.5, SVM, KNN and Naïve Bayes), and unsupervised, using the Expected Mutual Information Measure. The evaluation results are submitted to the statistical test of Kruskal-Wallis in order to determine the statistical significance of the performance difference of the different feature selection methods. Six text bases are used in the experimental evaluation, each one related to one domain and containing sub domains, which correspond to the classes used for supervised evaluation. Through this study, this work aims to contribute with a Text Mining application that extracts topic taxonomies from unlabeled text collections, through the selection of the most representative features in a text collection. The evaluation results show that there is no statistical difference between the unsupervised feature selection methods compared. Moreover, comparisons of these unsupervised methods with other supervised ones (Gain Ratio and Information Gain) show that it is possible to use unsupervised methods in supervised Text Mining activities, obtaining an efficiency compatible with supervised methods, since there isnt any statistical difference the statistical test detected in these comparisons, and with a lower computational effort

ASSUNTO(S)

mineração de textos aprendizado de máquina text mining aprendizado não-supervisionado feature selection seleção de atributos machine learning unsupervised learning

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