Performance of Naïve Bayes in Sentiment Analysis of User Reviews Online

Abstract

Both sellers and buyers heavily depend on the opinions of customers in purchasing and selling products online. When it comes to text-based data, sentiment analysis of user reviews has become a prominent facet of machine learning. Text data is generally unstructured which makes opinion mining very challenging. A wide array of pre-processing and post-processing techniques need to be applied. But the major challenge is selecting the right classifier for the job. Naïve Bayes algorithm is a commonly used machine learning classifier when it comes to opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The focus of this survey is to observe and analyze the performance of Naïve Bayes algorithm in sentiment analysis of user reviews online. Recent research from a wide array of use-cases such as sentiment analysis of movie reviews, product reviews, book reviews, blog posts, microblogs and other sources of data have been taken into account. The results show that Naïve Bayes algorithm performs exceptionally well with accuracies between 75% to 99% across the board.