Robustness and Predictive Performance of Homogeneous Ensemble Feature Selection in Text Classification

Abstract

The use of ensemble paradigm with classifiers is a proven approach that involves combining the outcomes of several classifiers. It has recently been extrapolated to feature selection methods to find the most relevant features. Earlier, ensemble feature selection has been used in high dimensional, low sample size datasets like bioinformatics. To one's knowledge there is no such endeavor in the text classification domain. In this work, the ensemble feature selection using data perturbation in the text classification domain has been used with an aim to enhance predictability and stability. This approach involves application of the same feature selector to different perturbed versions of training data, obtaining different ranks for a feature. Previous works focus only on one of the metrics, that is, stability or accuracy. In this work, a combined framework is adopted that assesses both the predictability and stability of the feature selection method by using feature selection ensemble. This approach has been explored on univariate and multivariate feature selectors, using two rank aggregators.