Feature Selection Using New Version of V-Shaped Transfer Function for Salp Swarm Algorithm in Sentiment Analysis

(1) Background: Feature selection is the biggest challenge in feature-rich sentiment analysis to select the best (relevant) feature set, offer information about the relationships between features (informative), and be noise-free from high-dimensional datasets to improve classifier performance. This study aims to propose a binary version of a metaheuristic optimization algorithm based on Swarm Intelligence, namely the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA), as feature selection in sentiment analysis. (2) Methods: Significant feature subsets were selected using the SSA. Transfer functions with various types of the form S-TF, V-TF, X-TF, U-TF, Z-TF, and the new type V-TF with a simpler mathematical formula are used as a binary version approach to enable search agents to move in the search space. The stages of the study include data pre-processing, feature selection using SSA-TF and other conventional feature selection methods, modelling using K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine, and Naive Bayes, and model evaluation. (3) Results: The results showed an increase of 31.55% to the best accuracy of 80.95% for the KNN model using SSA-based New V-TF. (4) Conclusions: We have found that SSA-New V3-TF is a feature selection method with the highest accuracy and less runtime compared to other algorithms in sentiment analysis.