Hybrid Approach of Pearson Correlation and PCA in Feature Selection for Opinion Mining

Abstract

This study proposes a hybrid feature selection approach that combines Pearson Correlation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to improve classification performance in opinion mining tasks. The rapid growth of e-commerce on social media platforms, such as TikTok, has generated a significant volume of user-generated reviews, which are valuable sources of consumer sentiment. However, the high dimensionality of textual data poses challenges in achieving accurate sentiment classification. To address this issue, the proposed method first applies Pearson Correlation to remove irrelevant features with weak correlation to sentiment labels, followed by PCA to reduce dimensionality. The dataset consists of user reviews from the TikTok Seller platform. Experiments using SVM, Naive Bayes, and Random Forest show that the hybrid approach achieves the highest accuracy of 86.2% (SVM and RF), improving over PCA-only by +0.9% and recovering 13.8% accuracy loss for Naive Bayes (from 72.0% to 83.1%). The results demonstrate that integrating correlation- and projection-based methods yields a more compact and effective feature set. This approach is especially suited for opinion mining in noisy, high-dimensional e-commerce data.