Evaluation of text classification

Figure 13.9: A sample document from the Reuters-21578 collection.

Table 13.7: The ten largest classes in the Reuters-21578 collection with number of documents in training and test sets.

class	# train	# test		class	# train	# test
earn	2877	1087		trade	369	119
acquisitions	1650	179		interest	347	131
money-fx	538	179		ship	197	89
grain	433	149		wheat	212	71
crude	389	189		corn	182	56

Historically, the classic Reuters-21578 collection was the main benchmark for text classification evaluation. This is a collection of 21,578 newswire articles, originally collected and labeled by Carnegie Group, Inc. and Reuters, Ltd. in the course of developing the CONSTRUE text classification system. It is much smaller than and predates the Reuters-RCV1 collection discussed in Chapter 4 (page 4.2 ). The articles are assigned classes from a set of 118 topic categories. A document may be assigned several classes or none, but the commonest case is single assignment (documents with at least one class received an average of 1.24 classes). The standard approach to this any-of problem (Chapter 14 , page 14.5 ) is to learn 118 two-class classifiers, one for each class, where the two-class classifier for class $\tcjclass$ is the classifier for the two classes $\tcjclass$ and its complement $\overline{\tcjclass}$.

For each of these classifiers, we can measure recall, precision, and accuracy. In recent work, people almost invariably use the ModApte split which includes only documents that were viewed and assessed by a human indexer, and comprises 9603 training documents and 3299 test documents. The distribution of documents in classes is very uneven, and some work evaluates systems on only documents in the 10 largest classes. They are listed in Table 13.7 . A typical document with topics is shown in Figure 13.9 .

In Section 13.1 we stated as our goal in text classification the minimization of classification error on test data. Classification error is 1.0 minus classification accuracy, the proportion of correct decisions, a measure we introduced in Section 8.3 (page 8.3 ). This measure is appropriate if the percentage of documents in the class is high, perhaps 10-20% and higher. But as we discussed in Section 8.3 , accuracy is not a good measure for ``small'' classes since always saying no, a strategy that defeats the purpose of building a classifier, will achieve high accuracy. The always-no classifier is 99% accurate for a class with relative frequency 1%. For small classes, precision, recall and $F_1$ are better measures.

We will use effectiveness as a generic term for measures that evaluate the quality of classification decisions, including precision, recall, $F_1$ and accuracy. Performance refers to the computational efficiency of classification and information retrieval systems in this book. However, many researchers mean effectiveness, not efficiency of text classification when they use the term performance.

class 1
	truth:	truth:
	yes	no
call: yes	10	10
call: no	10	970

class 2
	truth:	truth:
	yes	no
call: yes	90	10
call: no	10	890

pooled table
	truth:	truth:
	yes	no
call: yes	100	20
call: no	20	1860

Macro- and microaveraging. ``Truth'' is the true class and ``call'' the decision of the classifier. In this example, macroaveraged precision is $[10/(10+10)+90/(10+90)]/2 = (0.5+0.9)/2=0.7$. Microaveraged precision is $100/(100+20)\approx 0.83$.

When we process a collection with several two-class classifiers (such as Reuters-21578 with its 118 classes), we often want to compute a single aggregate measure that combines the measures for individual classifiers. There are two methods for doing this. Macroaveraging computes a simple average over classes. Microaveraging pools per-document decisions across classes, and then computes an effectiveness measure on the pooled contingency table. Table 13.8 gives an example.

The differences between the two methods can be large. Macroaveraging gives equal weight to each class, whereas microaveraging gives equal weight to each per-document classification decision. Since the $F_1$ measure ignores true negatives and its magnitude is mostly determined by the number of true positives, large classes dominate small classes in microaveraging. In the example, microaveraged precision (0.83) is much closer to the precision of $c_2$ (0.9) than to the precision of $c_1$ (0.5) because $c_2$ is five times larger than $c_1$. Microaveraged results are therefore really a measure of effectiveness on the large classes in a test collection. To get a sense of effectiveness on small classes, you should compute macroaveraged results.

In one-of classification (more-than-two-classes), microaveraged $F_1$ is the same as accuracy (Exercise 13.6 ).

(a)		NB	Rocchio	kNN		SVM
	micro-avg-L (90 classes)	80	85	86		89
	macro-avg (90 classes)	47	59	60		60
(b)		NB	Rocchio	kNN	trees	SVM
	earn	96	93	97	98	98
	acq	88	65	92	90	94
	money-fx	57	47	78	66	75
	grain	79	68	82	85	95
	crude	80	70	86	85	89
	trade	64	65	77	73	76
	interest	65	63	74	67	78
	ship	85	49	79	74	86
	wheat	70	69	77	93	92
	corn	65	48	78	92	90
	micro-avg (top 10)	82	65	82	88	92
	micro-avg-D (118 classes)	75	62	n/a	n/a	87

Text classification effectiveness numbers on Reuters-21578 for F$_1$ (in percent).Results from Li and Yang (2003) (a), Joachims (1998) (b: kNN) and Dumais et al. (1998) (b: NB, Rocchio, trees, SVM).

Table 13.9 gives microaveraged and macroaveraged effectiveness of Naive Bayes for the ModApte split of Reuters-21578. To give a sense of the relative effectiveness of Naive Bayes, we compare it with linear SVMs (rightmost column; see Chapter 15 ), one of the most effective classifiers, but also one that is more expensive to train than NB. Naive Bayes has a microaveraged $F_1$ of 80% which is 9% less than the SVM (89%), a 10% relative decrease (row ``micro-avg-L (90 classes)''). So there is a surprisingly small effectiveness penalty for its simplicity and efficiency. However, on small classes, some of which only have on the order of ten positive examples in the training set, Naive Bayes does much worse. Its macroaveraged $F_1$ is 13% below the SVM, a 22% relative decrease (row ``macro-avg (90 classes)'').

The table also compares Naive Bayes with the other classifiers we cover in this book: Rocchio and kNN. In addition, we give numbers for decision trees , an important classification method we do not cover. The bottom part of the table shows that there is considerable variation from class to class. For instance, NB beats kNN on ship, but is much worse on money-fx.

Comparing parts (a) and (b) of the table, one is struck by the degree to which the cited papers' results differ. This is partly due to the fact that the numbers in (b) are break-even scores (cf. page 8.4 ) averaged over 118 classes whereas the numbers in (a) are true $F_1$ scores (computed without any knowledge of the test set) averaged over 90 classes. This is unfortunately typical of what happens when comparing different results in text classification: There are often differences in the experimental setup or the evaluation that complicate the interpretation of the results.

These and other results have shown that the average effectiveness of Naive Bayes is uncompetitive with classifiers like SVMs when trained and tested on independent and identically distributed ( i.i.d. ) data, that is, uniform data with all the good properties of statistical sampling. However, these differences may often be invisible or even reverse themselves when working in the real world where, usually, the training sample is drawn from a subset of the data to which the classifier will be applied, the nature of the data drifts over time rather than being stationary (the problem of concept drift we mentioned on page 13.4 ), and there may well be errors in the data (among other problems). Many practitioners have had the experience of being unable to build a fancy classifier for a certain problem that consistently performs better than Naive Bayes.

Our conclusion from the results in Table 13.9 is that while most researchers believe that an SVM is better than kNN and kNN better than NB, the ranking of classifiers ultimately depends on the class, the document collection and the experimental setup. In text classification, there is always more to know than simply which machine learning algorithm was used, as we further discuss in Section 15.3 (page ).

When performing evaluations like the one in Table 13.9 it is important to maintain a strict separation between the training set and the test set . We can easily make correct classification decisions on the test set by using information we have gleaned from the test set, such as the fact that a particular term is a good predictor in the test set (even though this is not the case in the training set). A more subtle example of using knowledge about the test set is to try a large number of values of a parameter (e.g., the number of selected features) and select the value that is best for the test set. As a rule, accuracy on new data - the type of data we will encounter when we use the classifier in an application - will be much lower than accuracy on a test set that the classifier has been tuned for. We discussed the same problem in ad hoc retrieval in Section 8.1 (page 8.1 ).

In a clean statistical text classification experiment, you should never run any program on or even look at the test set while developing a text classification system. Instead, set aside a development set for testing while you develop your method. When such a set serves the primary purpose of finding a good value for a parameter, e.g., the number of selected features, then it is also called held-out data. Train the classifier on the rest of the training set with different parameter values, and then select the value that gives best results on the held-out part of the training set. Ideally, at the very end, when all parameters have been set and the method is fully specified, you run one final experiment on the test set and publish the results. Since no information about the test set was used in developing the classifier, the results of this experiment should be indicative of actual performance in practice.

This ideal often cannot be met since researchers tend to evaluate several systems on the same test set over a period of several years. But it is nevertheless highly important to not look at the test data and to run systems on it as sparingly as possible. Beginners often violate this rule, and their results lose validity, because they have implicitly tuned their system to the test data simply by running many variant systems and keeping the tweaks to the system that worked best on the test set.

Exercises.

• Assume a situation where every document in the test collection has been assigned exactly one class, and that a classifier also assigns exactly one class to each document. This setup is called one-of classification more-than-two-classes. Show that in one-of classification (i) the total number of false positive decisions equals the total number of false negative decisions and (ii) microaveraged $F_1$ and accuracy are identical.