Exploring performance of instance selection methods in text sentiment classification

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is the process of extracting subjective information in source materials. Sentiment analysis is a subfield of web and text mining. One major problem encountered in these areas is overwhelming amount of data available. Hence, instance selection and feature selection become two essential tasks for achieving scalability in machine learning based sentiment classification. Instance selection is a data reduction technique which aims to eliminate redundant, noisy data from the training dataset so that training time can be reduced, scalability and generalization ability can be enhanced. This paper examines the predictive performance of fifteen benchmark instance selection methods for text classification domain. The instance selection methods are evaluated by decision tree classifier (C4.5 algorithm) and radial basis function networks in terms of classification accuracy and data reduction rates. The experimental results indicate that the highest classification accuracies on C4.5 algorithm are generally obtained by model class selection method, while the highest classification accuracies on radial basis function networks are obtained by nearest centroid neighbor edition.