Feature Selection with β-Hill Climbing Search for Text Clustering Application

Abstract

In the bases of increasing the volume of text information, the dealing with text information has become incredibly complicated. The text clustering is a suitable technique used in dealing with a tremendous amount of text documents by classifying these set of text documents into clusters. Ultimately, text documents hold sparse, non-uniform distribution and uninformative features are difficult to cluster. The text feature selection is a primary unsupervised learning method that is utilized to choose a new subset of informational text features. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed based on β-hill climbing technique for text feature selection problem to improve the text clustering (B-FSTC). The results of the proposed method for β-hill climbing and original Hill climbing (i.e., H-FSTC) are examined using the k-mean text clustering and compared with each other. Experiments were conducted on four standard text datasets with varying characteristics. Interestingly, the proposed β-hill climbing algorithm obtains superior results in comparison with the other well-regard techniques by producing a new subset of informational text features. Lastly, the β-hill climbing-based feature selection method supports the k-mean clustering algorithm to achieve more precise clusters.