I am facing a binary prediction task and have a set of features of which all are categorical. A key challenge is therefore to encode those categorical features to numbers and I was looking for smart ways to do so.
I stumbled over word2vec, which is mostly used for NLP, but I was wondering whether I could use it to encode my variables, i.e. simply take the weights of the neural net as the encoded features.
However, I am not sure, whether it is a good idea since, the context words, which serve as the input features in word2vec are in my case more or less random, in contrast to real sentences which word2vec was originially made for.
Do you guys have any advice, thoughts, recommendations on this?
You should look into entity embedding if you are searching for a way to utilize embeddings for categorical variables.
google has a good crash course on the topic: https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course/embeddings/categorical-input-data
this is a good paper on arxiv written by a team from a Kaggle competition: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06737
It's certainly possible to use the word2vec algorithm to train up 'dense embeddings' for things like keywords, tags, categories, and so forth. It's been done, sometimes beneficially.
Whether it's a good idea in your case will depend on your data & goals – the only way to know for sure is to try it, and evaluate the results versus your alternatives. (For example, if the number of categories is modest from a controlled vocabulary, one-hot encoding of the categories may be practical, and depending on the kind of binary classifier you use downstream, the classifier may itself be able to learn the same sorts of subtle interrelationships between categories that could also otherwise be learned via a word2vec model. On the other hand, if categories are very numerous & chaotic, the pre-step of 'compressing' them into a smaller-dimensional space, where similar categories have similar representational vectors, may be more helpful.)
That such tokens don't quite have the same frequency distributions & surrounding contexts as true natural language text may mean it's worth trying a wider range of non-default training options on any word2vec model.
In particular, if your categories don't have a natural ordering giving rise to meaningful near-neighbors relationships, using a giant window (so all words in a single 'text' are in each others' contexts) may be worth considering.
Recent versions of the Python gensim Word2Vec allow changing a parameter named ns_exponent – which was fixed at 0.75 in many early implementations, but at least one paper has suggested can usefully vary far from that value for certain corpus data and recommendation-like applications.
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I'm new to NLP. I'm currently building a NLP system in a specific domain. After training a word2vec and fasttext model on my documents, I found that the embedding is not really good because I didn't feed enough number of documents (e.g. the embedding can't see that "bar" and "pub" is strongly correlated to each other because "pub" only appears a few in the documents). Later, I found a word2vec model online built on that domain-specific corpus which definitely has a way better embedding (so "pub" is more related to "bar"). Is there any way to improve my word embedding using the model I found? Thanks!
Word2Vec (and similar) models really require a large volume of varied data to create strong vectors.
But also, a model's vectors are typically only meaningful alongside other vectors that were trained together in the same session. This is both because the process includes some randomness, and the vectors only acquire their useful positions via a tug-of-war with all other vectors and aspects of the model-in-training.
So, there's no standard location for a word like 'bar' - just a good position, within a certain model, given the training data and model parameters and other words co-populating the model.
This means mixing vectors from different models is non-trivial. There are ways to learn a 'translation' that moves vectors from the space of one model to another – but that is itself a lot like a re-training. You can pre-initialize a model with vectors from elsewhere... but as soon as training starts, all the words in your training corpus will start drifting into the best alignment for that data, and gradually away from their original positions, and away from pure comparability with other words that aren't being updated.
In my opinion, the best approach is usually to expand your corpus with more appropriate data, so that it has "enough" examples of every word important to you, in sufficiently varied contexts.
Many people use large free text dumps like Wikipedia articles for word-vector training, but be aware that its style of writing – dry, authoritative reference texts – may not be optimal for all domains. If your problem-area is "business reviews", you'd probably do best finding other review texts. If it's fiction stories, more fictional writing. And so forth. You can shuffle these other text-soruces in with your data to expand the vocabulary coverage.
You can also potentially shuffle in extra repeated examples of your own local data, if you want it to effectively have relatively more influence. (Generally, merely repeating a small number of non-varied examples can't help improve word-vectors: it's the subtle contrasts of different examples that helps. But as a way to incrementally boost the influence of some examples, when there are plenty of examples overall, it can make more sense.)
I have used a ML approach to my research using python scikit-learn. I found that SVM and logistic regression classifiers work best (eg: 85% accuracy), decision trees works markedly worse (65%), and then Naive Bayes works markedly worse (40%).
I will write up the conclusion to illustrate the obvious that some ML classifiers worked better than the others by a large margin, but what else can I say about my learning task or data structure based on these observations?
Edition:
The data set involved 500,000 rows, and I have 15 features but some of the features are various combination of substrings of certain text, so it naturally expands to tens of thousands of columns as a sparse matrix. I am using people's name to predict some binary class (eg: Gender), though I feature engineer a lot from the name entity like the length of the name, the substrings of the name, etc.
I recommend you to visit this awesome map on choosing the right estimator by the scikit-learn team http://scikit-learn.org/stable/tutorial/machine_learning_map
As describing the specifics of your own case would be an enormous task (I totally understand you didn't do it!) I encourage you to ask yourself several questions. Thus, I think the map on 'choosing the right estimator' is a good start.
Literally, go to the 'start' node in the map and follow the path:
is my number of samples > 50?
And so on. In the end you might end at some point and see if your results match with the recommendations in the map (i.e. did I end up in a SVM, which gives me better results?). If so, go deeper into the documentation and ask yourself why is that one classifier performing better on text data or whatever insight you get.
As I told you, we don't know the specifics of your data, but you should be able to ask such questions: what type of data do I have (text, binary, ...), how many samples, how many classes to predict, ... So ideally your data is going to give you some hints about the context of your problem, therefore why some estimators perform better than others.
But yeah, your question is really broad to grasp in a single answer (and specially without knowing the type of problem you are dealing with). You could also check if there might by any of those approaches more inclined to overfit, for example.
The list of recommendations could be endless, this is why I encourage you to start defining the type of problem you are dealing with and your data (plus to the number of samples, is it normalized? Is it disperse? Are you representing text in sparse matrix, are your inputs floats from 0.11 to 0.99).
Anyway, if you want to share some specifics on your data we might be able to answer more precisely. Hope this helped a little bit, though ;)
I checked several document clustering algorithms, such as LSA, pLSA, LDA, etc. It seems they all require to represent the documents to be clustered as a document-word matrix, where the rows stand for document and the columns stand for words appearing in the document. And the matrix is often very sparse.
I am wondering, is there any other options to represent documents besides using the document-word matrix? Because I believe the way we express a problem has a significant influence on how well we can solve it.
As #ffriend pointed out, you cannot really avoid using the term-document-matrix (TDM) paradigm. Clustering methods operates on points in a vector space, and this is exactly what the TDM encodes. However, within that conceptual framework there are many things you can do to improve the quality of the TDM:
feature selection and re-weighting attempt to remove or weight down features (words) that do not contribute useful information (in the sense that your chosen algorithm does just as well or better without these features, or if their counts are decremented). You might want to read more about Mutual Information (and its many variants) and TF-IDF.
dimensionality reduction is about encoding the information as accurately as possible in the TDM using less columns. Singular Value Decomposition (the basis of LSA) and Non-Negative Tensor Factorisation are popular in the NLP community. A desirable side effect is that the TDM becomes considerably less sparse.
feature engineering attempts to build a TDM where the choice of columns is motivated by linguistic knowledge. For instance, you may want to use bigrams instead of words, or only use nouns (requires a part-of-speech tagger), or only use nouns with their associated adjectival modifier (e.g. big cat, requires a dependency parser). This is a very empirical line of work and involves a lot of experimentation, but often yield improved results.
the distributional hypothesis makes if possible to get a vector representing the meaning of each word in a document. There has been work on trying to build up a representation of an entire document from the representations of the words it contains (composition). Here is a shameless link to my own post describing the idea.
There is a massive body of work on formal and logical semantics that I am not intimately familiar with. A document can be encoded as a set of predicates instead of a set of words, i.e. the columns of the TDM can be predicates. In that framework you can do inference and composition, but lexical semantics (the meaning if individual words) is hard to deal with.
For a really detailed overview, I recommend Turney and Pantel's "From Frequency to Meaning : Vector Space Models of Semantics".
You question says you want document clustering, not term clustering or dimensionality reduction. Therefore I'd suggest you steer clear of the LSA family of methods, since they're a preprocessing step.
Define a feature-based representation of your documents (which can be, or include, term counts but needn't be), and then apply a standard clustering method. I'd suggest starting with k-means as it's extremely easy and there are many, many implementations of it.
OK, this is quite a very general question, and many answers are possible, none is definitive
because it's an ongoing research area. So far, the answers I have read mainly concern so-called "Vector-Space models", and your question is termed in a way that suggests such "statistical" approaches. Yet, if you want to avoid manipulating explicit term-document matrices, you might want to have a closer look at the Bayesian paradigm, which relies on
the same distributional hypothesis, but exploits a different theoretical framework: you don't manipulate any more raw distances, but rather probability distributions and, which is the most important, you can do inference based on them.
You mentioned LDA, I guess you mean Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which is the most well-known such Bayesian model to do document clustering. It is an alternative paradigm to vector space models, and a winning one: it has been proven to give very good results, which justifies its current success. Of course, one can argue that you still use kinds of term-document matrices through the multinomial parameters, but it's clearly not the most important aspect, and Bayesian researchers do rarely (if ever) use this term.
Because of its success, there are many software that implements LDA on the net. Here is one, but there are many others:
http://jgibblda.sourceforge.net/
I want to text classification based on the keywords appear in the text, because I do not have sample data to use naive bayes for text classification.
Example:
my document has some few words as "family, mother , father , children ... " that the categories of document are family.Or "football, tennis, score ... " that the category is sport
What is the best algorithm in this case ?.And is there any api java for this problem?
What you have are feature labels, i.e., labels on features rather than instances. There are a few methods for exploiting these, but usually it is assumed that one has instance labels (i.e., labels on documents) in addition to feature labels. This paradigm is referred to as dual-supervision.
Anyway, I know of at least two ways to learn from labeled features alone. The first is Generalized Expectation Criteria, which penalizes model parameters for diverging from a priori beliefs (e.g., that "moether" ought usually to correlate with "family"). This method has the disadvantage of being somewhat complex, but the advantage of having a nicely packaged, open-source Java implementation in the Mallet toolkit (see here, specifically).
A second option would basically be to use Naive Bayes and give large priors to the known word/class associations -- e.g., P("family"|"mother") = .8, or whatever. All unlabeled words would be assigned some prior, presumably reflecting class distribution. You would then effectively being making decisions only based on the prevalence of classes and the labeled term information. Settles proposed a model like this recently, and there is a web-tool available.
You likely will need an auxillary data set for this. You cannot rely on your data set to convey the information that "dad" and "father" and "husband" have a similar meaning.
You can try to do mine for co-occurrences to detect near-synonyms, but this is not very reliable.
Probably wordnet etc. are a good place to disambiguate such words.
You can download the freebase topic collection: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Topic_API.
I am doing the text categorization machine learning problem using Naive Bayes. I have each word as a feature. I have been able to implement it and I am getting good accuracy.
Is it possible for me to use tuples of words as features?
For example, if there are two classes, Politics and sports. The word called government might appear in both of them. However, in politics I can have a tuple (government, democracy) whereas in the class sports I can have a tuple (government, sportsman). So, if a new text article comes in which is politics, the probability of the tuple (government, democracy) has more probability than the tuple (government, sportsman).
I am asking this is because by doing this am I violating the independence assumption of the Naive Bayes problem, because I am considering single words as features too.
Also, I am thinking of adding weights to features. For example, a 3-tuple feature will have less weight than a 4-tuple feature.
Theoretically, are these two approaches not changing the independence assumptions on the Naive Bayes classifier? Also, I have not started with the approach I mentioned yet but will this improve the accuracy? I think the accuracy might not improve but the amount of training data required to get the same accuracy would be less.
Even without adding bigrams, real documents already violate the independence assumption. Conditioned on having Obama in a document, President is much more likely to appear. Nonetheless, naive bayes still does a decent job at classification, even if the probability estimates it gives are hopelessly off. So I recommend that you go on and add more complex features to your classifier and see if they improve accuracy.
If you get the same accuracy with less data, that is basically equivalent to getting better accuracy with the same amount of data.
On the other hand, using simpler, more common features works better as you decrease the amount of data. If you try to fit too many parameters to too little data, you tend to overfit badly.
But the bottom line is to try it and see.
No, from a theoretical viewpoint, you are not changing the independence assumption. You are simply creating a modified (or new) sample space. In general, once you start using higher n-grams as events in your sample space, data sparsity becomes a problem. I think using tuples will lead to the same issue. You will probably need more training data, not less. You will probably also have to give a little more thought to the type of smoothing you use. Simple Laplace smoothing may not be ideal.
Most important point, I think, is this: whatever classifier you are using, the features are highly dependent on the domain (and sometimes even the dataset). For example, if you are classifying sentiment of texts based on movie reviews, using only unigrams may seem to be counterintuitive, but they perform better than using only adjectives. On the other hand, for twitter datasets, a combination of unigrams and bigrams were found to be good, but higher n-grams were not useful. Based on such reports (ref. Pang and Lee, Opinion mining and Sentiment Analysis), I think using longer tuples will show similar results, since, after all, tuples of words are simply points in a higher-dimensional space. The basic algorithm behaves the same way.