A Comparative Study of Feature Selection Methods

Abstract

Text analysis has been attracting increasing attention in this data era.Selecting effective features from datasets is a particular important part in text classification studies.Feature selection excludes irrelevant features from the classification task, reduces the dimensionality of a dataset, and improves the accuracy and performance of identification.So far, so many feature selection methods have been proposed, however, it remains unclear which method is the most effective in practice.This article focuses on evaluating and comparing the available feature selection methods in general versatility regarding authorship attribution problems and tries to identify which method is the most effective.The discussions on general versatility of feature selection methods and its connection in selecting the appropriate features for varying data were done.In addition, different languages, different types of features, different systems for calculating the accuracy of SVM (support vector machine), and different criteria for determining the rank of feature selection methods were used to measure the general versatility of these methods together.The analysis results indicate the best feature selection method is different for each dataset; however, some methods can always extract useful information to discriminate the classes.The chi-square was proved to be a better method overall.