Efficient feature selection techniques for sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is a domain of study that focuses on identifying and classifying the ideas expressed in the form of text into positive, negative and neutral polarities. Feature selection is a crucial process in machine learning. In this paper, we aim to study the performance of different feature selection techniques for sentiment analysis. Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) is used as the feature extraction technique for creating feature vocabulary. Various Feature Selection (FS) techniques are experimented to select the best set of features from feature vocabulary. The selected features are trained using different machine learning classifiers Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Tree (DT) and Naive Bayes (NB). Ensemble techniques Bagging and Random Subspace are applied on classifiers to enhance the performance on sentiment analysis. We show that, when the best FS techniques are trained using ensemble methods achieve remarkable results on sentiment analysis. We also compare the performance of FS methods trained using Bagging, Random Subspace with varied neural network architectures. We show that FS techniques trained using ensemble classifiers outperform neural networks requiring significantly less training time and parameters thereby eliminating the need for extensive hyper-parameter tuning.