Feature selection for text classification using genetic algorithms

Abstract

In text classification, feature selection is essential to improve the classification effectiveness. This paper provides an empirical study of a feature selection method based on genetic algorithms for different text representation methods. This feature selection algorithm can accomplish two goals: in one hand is the search of a feature subset such that the performance of classifier is best; in other hands is find a feature subset with the smallest dimensionality which achieves higher accuracy in classification. To evaluate the performance of this approach, three from the best classifiers have been selected: Naive Bayes (NB), Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Our objective is to determine whether the genetic algorithms based feature selection will improve the performances in text classification with smaller size using F-measure. Experimentations were carried out on two benchmark document collections 20Newsgroups, and Reuters-21578. And the results were very interesting.