AEGA: enhanced feature selection based on ANOVA and extended genetic algorithm for online customer review analysis

Abstract

Sentiment analysis involves extricating and interpreting people’s views, feelings, beliefs, etc., about diverse actualities such as services, goods, and topics. People intend to investigate the users’ opinions on the online platform to achieve better performance. Regardless, the high-dimensional feature set in an online review study affects the interpretation of classification. Several studies have implemented different feature selection techniques; however, getting a high accuracy with a very minimal number of features is yet to be accomplished. This paper develops an effective hybrid approach based on an enhanced genetic algorithm (GA) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to achieve this purpose. To beat the local minima convergence problem, this paper uses a unique two-phase crossover and impressive selection approach, gaining high exploration and fast convergence of the model. The use of ANOVA drastically reduces the feature size to minimize the computational burden of the model. Experiments are performed to estimate the algorithm performance using different conventional classifiers and algorithms like GA, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), Random Forest, ExtraTree, AdaBoost, GradientBoost, and XGBoost. The proposed novel approach gives impressive results using the Amazon Review dataset with an accuracy of 78.60 %, F1 score of 79.38 %, and an average precision of 0.87, and the Restaurant Customer Review dataset with an accuracy of 77.70 %, F1 score of 78.24 %, and average precision of 0.89 as compared to other existing algorithms. The result shows that the proposed model outperforms other algorithms with nearly 45 and 42% fewer features for the Amazon Review and Restaurant Customer Review datasets.