A New Feature Selection Method for Text Classification Based on Independent Feature Space Search

Feature selection method is designed to select the representative feature subsets from the original feature set by different evaluation of feature relevance, which focuses on reducing the dimension of the features while maintaining the predictive accuracy of a classifier. In this study, we propose a feature selection method for text classification based on independent feature space search. Firstly, a relative document-term frequency difference (RDTFD) method is proposed to divide the features in all text documents into two independent feature sets according to the features’ ability to discriminate the positive and negative samples, which has two important functions: one is to improve the high class correlation of the features and reduce the correlation between the features and the other is to reduce the search range of feature space and maintain appropriate feature redundancy. Secondly, the feature search strategy is used to search the optimal feature subset in independent feature space, which can improve the performance of text classification. Finally, we evaluate several experiments conduced on six benchmark corpora, the experimental results show the RDTFD method based on independent feature space search is more robust than the other feature selection methods.