One-class document classification via Neural Networks

Automated document retrieval and classification is of central importance in many contexts; our main motivating goal is the efficient classification and retrieval of "interests" on the internet when only positive information is available. In this paper, we show how a simple feed-forward neural network can be trained to filter documents under these conditions, and that this method seems to be superior to modified methods (modified to use only positive examples), such as Rocchio, Nearest Neighbor, Naive-Bayes, Distance-based Probability and One-Class SVM algorithms. A novel experimental finding is that retrieval is enhanced substantially in this context by carrying out a certain kind of uniform transformation ("Hadamard") of the information prior to the training of the network. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.