An Efficient Feature Selection Method for Arabic Text Classification

This paper proposes an efficient, Chi-Square-based, feature selection method for Arabic text classification. In Data Mining, feature selection is a preprocessing step that can improve the classification performance. Although few works have studied the effect of feature selection methods on Arabic text classification, limited number of methods was compared. Furthermore, different datasets were used by different works. This paper improves the previous works in three aspects. First, it proposes a new efficient feature selection method for enhancing Arabic text classification. Second, it compares extended number of existing feature selection methods. Third, it adopts two publicly available datasets to encourage future works to adopt them in order to guarantee fair comparisons among the various works. Our experiments show that our proposed method outperformed the existing methods in term of accuracy.