Optimizing text classification through efficient feature selection based on quality metric

Feature maximization is a cluster quality metric which favors clusters with maximum feature representation as regard to their associated data. In this paper we show that a simple adaptation of such metric can provide a highly efficient feature selection and feature contrasting model in the context of supervised classification. The method is experienced on different types of textual datasets. The paper illustrates that the proposed method provides a very significant performance increase, as compared to state of the art methods, in all the studied cases even when a single bag of words model is exploited for data description. Interestingly, the most significant performance gain is obtained in the case of the classification of highly unbalanced, highly multidimensional and noisy data, with a high degree of similarity between the classes.