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I want to make sure I understand what the attributes use_idf and sublinear_tf do in the TfidfVectorizer object. I've been researching this for a few days. I am trying to classify documents with varied length and use currently tf-idf for feature selection.
I believe when use_idf=true the algo normalises the bias against the inherent issue (with TF) where a term that is X times more frequent shouldn't be X times as important.
Utilising the tf*idf formula. Then the sublinear_tf = true instills 1+log(tf) such that it normalises the bias against lengthy documents vs short documents.
I am dealing with an inherently bias towards lengthy documents (most belong to one class), does this normalisation really diminish the bias?
How can I make sure the length of the documents in the corpus are not integrated into the model?
I'm trying to verify that the normalisation is being applied in the model. I am trying to extract the normalizated vectors of the corpora, so I assumed I could just sum up each row of the Tfidfvectorizer matrix. However the sum are greater than 1, I thought a normalized copora would transform all documents to a range between 0-1.
vect = TfidfVectorizer(max_features=20000, strip_accents='unicode',
stop_words=stopwords,analyzer='word', use_idf=True, tokenizer=tokenizer, ngram_range=(1,2),sublinear_tf= True , norm='l2')
tfidf = vect.fit_transform(X_train)
# sum norm l2 documents
vect_sum = tfidf.sum(axis=1)
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In TF-IDF, normalization is generally used in two ways: first, to prevent bias in term frequency from terms in shorter or longer documents; second, to calculate each term's idf value (inverse document frequency).
TF-IDF got the maximum accuracy (93.81%), precision (94.20%), recall (93.81%), and F1-score (91.99%) value in Random Forest classifier.
Tf-idf, on the other hand, can generate scaling factors that are close to zero, as shown in Figure 4-2. This happens when the word is present in a large number of documents in the training set.
In particular, we pass the TfIdfVectorizer our own function that performs custom tokenization and stemming, but we use scikit-learn's built in stop word remove rather than NLTK's. Then we call fit_transform which does a few things: first, it creates a dictionary of 'known' words based on the input text given to it.
use_idf=true (by default) introduces a global component to the term frequency component (local component: individual article). When looking after the similarity of two texts, instead of counting the number of terms that each of them has and compare them, introducing the idf helps categorizing these terms into relevant or not. According to Zipf's law, the "frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank". That is, the most common word will appear twice as many times as the second most common word, three times as the third most common word etc. Even after removing stop words, all words are subjected to Zipf's law.
In this sense, imagine you have 5 articles describing a topic of automobiles. In this example the word "auto" will likely to appear in all 5 texts, and therefore will not be a unique identifier of a single text. On the other hand, if only an article describes auto "insurance" while another describes auto "mechanics", these two words ("mechanics" and "insurance") will be a unique identifier of each texts. By using the idf, words that appear less common in a texts ("mechanics" and "insurance" for example) will receive a higher weight. Therefore using an idf does not tackle the bias generated by the length of an article, since is again, a measure of a global component. If you want to reduce the bias generated by length then as you said, using sublinear_tf=True will be a way to solve it since you are transforming the local component (each article).
Hope it helps.
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Neither use_idf nor sublinear_tf deals with document length. And actually your explanation for use_idf "where a term that is X times more frequent shouldn't be X times as important" is more fitting as a description to sublinear_tf as sublinear_tf causes logarithmic increase in Tfidf score compared to the term frequency.
use_idf means to use Inverse Document Frequency, so that terms that appear very frequently to the extent they appear in most document (i.e., a bad indicator) get weighted less compared to terms that appear less frequently but they appear in specific documents only (i.e., a good indicator).
To reduce document length bias, you use normalization (norm in TfidfVectorizer parameter) as you proportionally scale each term's Tfidf score based on total score of that document (simple average for norm=l1, squared average for norm=l2)
By default, TfidfVectorizer already use norm=l2, though, so I'm not sure what is causing the problem you are facing. Perhaps those longer documents indeed contain similar words also? Also classification often depend a lot on the data, so I can't say much here to solve your problem.
References:
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