MDLText: An efficient and lightweight text classifier

Abstract

In many areas, the volume of text information is increasing rapidly, thereby demanding efficient text classification approaches. Several methods are available at present, but most exhibit declining performance as the dimensionality of the problem increases, or they incur high computational costs for training, which limit their application in real scenarios. Thus, it is necessary to develop a method that can process high dimensional data in a rapid manner. In this study, we propose the MDLText, an efficient, lightweight, scalable, and fast multinomial text classifier, which is based on the minimum description length principle. MDLText exhibits fast incremental learning as well as being sufficiently robust to prevent overfitting, which are desirable features in real-world applications, large-scale problems, and online scenarios. Our experiments were carefully designed to ensure that we obtained statistically sound results, which demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves a good balance between predictive power and computational efficiency.