A Comparative Study on Feature Selection Techniques for Multi-cluster Text Data

Text clustering involves data that are of very high dimension. Feature selection techniques find subsets of relevant features from the original feature space that help in efficient and effective clustering. Selection of relevant features merely on ranking scores without considering correlation interferes with the clustering performance. An efficient feature selection technique should be capable of preserving the multi-cluster structure of the data. The purpose of the present work is to demonstrate that feature selection techniques which take into consideration the correlation among features in multi-cluster scenario show better clustering results than those techniques that simply rank features independent of each other. This paper compares two feature selection techniques in this regard viz. the traditional Tf-Idf and the Multi-Cluster Feature Selection (MCFS) technique. The experimental results over the TDT2 and Reuters-21,578 datasets show the superior clustering results of MCFS over traditional Tf-Idf.