Using chi-square statistics to measure similarities for text categorization

In this paper, we propose using chi-square statistics to measure similarities and chi-square tests to determine the homogeneity of two random samples of term vectors for text categorization. The properties of chi-square tests for text categorization are studied first. One of the advantages of chi-square test is that its significance level is similar to the miss rate that provides a foundation for theoretical performance (i.e. miss rate) guarantee. Generally a classifier using cosine similarities with IF I* IDF performs reasonably well in text categorization. However, its performance may fluctuate even near the optimal threshold value. To improve the limitation, we propose the combined usage of chi-square statistics and cosine similarities. Extensive experiment results verify properties of chi-square tests and performance of the combined usage. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.