Text categorization via generalized discriminant analysis

Text categorization is an important research area and has been receiving much attention due to the growth of the on-line information and of Internet. Automated text categorization is generally cast as a multi-class classification problem. Much of previous work focused on binary document classification problems. Support vector machines (SVMs) excel in binary classification, but the elegant theory behind large-margin hyperplane cannot be easily extended to multi-class text classification. In addition, the training time and scaling are also important concerns. On the other hand, other techniques naturally extensible to handle multi-class classification are generally not as accurate as SVM. This paper presents a simple and efficient solution to multi-class text categorization. Classification problems are first formulated as optimization via discriminant analysis. Text categorization is then cast as the problem of finding coordinate transformations that reflects the inherent similarity from the data. While most of the previous approaches decompose a multi-class classification problem into multiple independent binary classification tasks, the proposed approach enables direct multi-class classification. By using generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD), a coordinate transformation that reflects the inherent class structure indicated by the generalized singular values is identified. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach. 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.