A Bayesian Classification Approach Using Class-Specific Features for Text Categorization

Abstract

In this paper, we present a Bayesian classification approach for automatic text categorization using class-specific features. Unlike conventional text categorization approaches, our proposed method selects a specific feature subset for each class. To apply these class-specific features for classification, we follow Baggenstoss's PDF Projection Theorem (PPT) to reconstruct the PDFs in raw data space from the class-specific PDFs in low-dimensional feature subspace, and build a Bayesian classification rule. One noticeable significance of our approach is that most feature selection criteria, such as Information Gain (IG) and Maximum Discrimination (MD), can be easily incorporated into our approach. We evaluate our method's classification performance on several real-world benchmarks, compared with the state-of-the-art feature selection approaches. The superior results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and further indicate its wide potential applications in data mining.