Variable selection for Naïve Bayes classification

The Naïve Bayes has proven to be a tractable and efficient method for classification in multivariate analysis. However, features are usually correlated, a fact that violates the Naïve Bayes’ assumption of conditional independence, and may deteriorate the method’s performance. Moreover, datasets are...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Blanquero Bravo, Rafael, Carrizosa Priego, Emilio José, Ramírez Cobo, Josefa, Sillero Denamiel, María Remedios
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/135042
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/135042
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2021.105456
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Clustering
Conditional independence
Dependence measures
Heuristics
Probabilistic classification
Cost-sensitive classification
Descripción
Sumario:The Naïve Bayes has proven to be a tractable and efficient method for classification in multivariate analysis. However, features are usually correlated, a fact that violates the Naïve Bayes’ assumption of conditional independence, and may deteriorate the method’s performance. Moreover, datasets are often characterized by a large number of features, which may complicate the interpretation of the results as well as slow down the method’s execution. In this paper we propose a sparse version of the Naïve Bayes classifier that is characterized by three properties. First, the sparsity is achieved taking into account the correlation structure of the covariates. Second, different performance measures can be used to guide the selection of features. Third, performance constraints on groups of higher interest can be included. Our proposal leads to a smart search, which yields competitive running times, whereas the flexibility in terms of performance measure for classification is integrated. Our findings show that, when compared against well-referenced feature selection approaches, the proposed sparse Naïve Bayes obtains competitive results regarding accuracy, sparsity and running times for balanced datasets. In the case of datasets with unbalanced (or with different importance) classes, a better compromise between classification rates for the different classes is achieved.