Text classification: A least square support vector machine approach

This paper presents a least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) that performs text classification of noisy document titles according to different predetermined categories. The system’s potential is demonstrated with a corpus of 91,229 words from University of Denver’s Penrose Library catalogue. The classification accuracy of the proposed LS-SVM based system is found to be over 99.9%. The final classifier is an LS-SVM array with Gaussian radial basis function (GRBF) kernel, which uses the coefficients generated by the latent semantic indexing algorithm for classification of the text titles. These coefficients are also used to generate the confidence factors for the inference engine that present the final decision of the entire classifier. The system is also compared with a K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Naı̈ve Bayes (NB) classifier and the comparison clearly claims that the proposed LS-SVM based architecture outperforms the KNN and NB based system. The comparison between the conventional linear SVM based classifiers and neural network based classifying agents shows that the LS-SVM with LSI based classifying agents improves text categorization performance significantly and holds a lot of potential for developing robust learning based agents for text classification. # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.