Structure extended multinomial naive Bayes

Multinomial naive Bayes (MNB) assumes that all attributes (i.e., features) are independent of each other given the context of the class, and it ignores all dependencies among attributes. However, in many real-world applications, the attribute independence assumption required by MNB is often violated and thus harms its performance. To weaken this assumption, one of the most direct ways is to extend its structure to represent explicitly attribute dependencies by adding arcs between attributes. On the other hand, although a Bayesian network can represent arbitrary attribute dependencies, learning an optimal Bayesian network from high-dimensional text data is almost impossible. The main reason is that learning the optimal structure of a Bayesian network from high-dimensional text data is extremely time and space consuming. Thus, it would be desirable if a multinomial Bayesian network model can avoid structure learning and be able to represent attribute dependencies to some extent. In this paper, we propose a novel model called structure extended multinomial naive Bayes (SEMNB). SEMNB alleviates the attribute independence assumption by averaging all of the weighted one-dependence multinomial estimators. To learn SEMNB, we propose a simple but effective learning algorithm without structure searching. The experimental results on a large suite of benchmark text datasets show that SEMNB significantly outperforms MNB and is even markedly better than other three state-of-the-art improved algorithms including TOM, DWMNB, and Rw,cMNB. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.