Classification of Small Datasets: Why Using Class-Based Weighting Measures?

Abstract. In text classification, providing an efficient classifier even if the num-ber of documents involved in the learning step is small remains an important is-sue. In this paper we evaluate the performance of traditional classification meth-ods to better evaluate their limitation in the learning phase when dealing with small amount of documents. We thus propose a new way for weighting features which are used for classifying. These features have been integrated in two well known classifiers: Class-Feature-Centroid and Naı̈ve Bayes, and evaluations have been performed on two real datasets. We have also investigated the influence on parameters such as number of classes, documents or words in the classification. Experiments have shown the efficiency of our proposal relatively to state of the art classification methods. Either with a very few amount of data or with a small number of features that can be extracted from poor content documents, we show that our approach performs well.