An attribute value frequency-based instance weighting filter for naive Bayes

Due to its simplicity, efficiency and efficacy, naive Bayes (NB) continues to be one of the top 10 data mining algorithms. A mass of improved approaches to NB have been proposed to weaken its conditional independence assumption. However, there has been little work, up to the present, on instance weighting filter approaches to NB. In this paper, we propose a simple, efficient, and effective instance weighting filter approach to NB. We call it attribute (feature) value frequency-based instance weighting and denote the resulting improved model as attribute value frequency weighted naive Bayes (AVFWNB). In AVFWNB, the weight of each training instance is defined as the inner product of its attribute value frequency vector and the attribute value number vector. The experimental results on 36 widely used classification problems show that AVFWNB significantly outperforms NB, yet at the same time maintains the computational simplicity that characterizes NB.