Feature selection for sentiment analysis using hybrid multiobjective evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

As the volume of data continues to grow, the significance of text classification is on the rise. This vast amount of data majorly exists in the form of texts. Effective data preparation is essential to extract sentiment data from this vast amount of text, as irrelevant and redundant information can impede valuable insights. Feature selection is an important step in the data preparation phase as it eliminates irrelevant and insignificant features from the huge features set. There exist a large body of work related to feature selection for image processing but limited research is done for text data. While some studies recognize the significance of feature selection in text classification, but there is still need for more efficient sentiment analysis models that optimize feature selection and reduce computational. This manuscript aims to bridge these gaps by introducing a hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm as a feature selection mechanism, combining the power of multiple objectives and evolutionary processes. The approach combines two feature selection techniques within a binary classification model: a filter method, Information Gain (IG), and an evolutionary wrapper method, Binary Multi-Objective Grey Wolf Optimizer (BMOGWO). Experimental evaluations are conducted across six diverse datasets. It achieves a reduction of over 90 percent in feature size while improving accuracy by nearly nine percent. These results showcase the model’s efficiency in terms of computational time and its efficacy in terms of higher classification accuracy which improves sentiment analysis performance. This improvement can be beneficial for various applications, including recommendation systems, reviews analysis, and public opinion observation. However, it’s crucial to acknowledge certain limitations of this study. These encompass the need for broader classifier evaluation, and scalability considerations with larger datasets. These identified limitations serve as directions for future research and the enhancement of the proposed approach.