A divisive information theoretic feature clustering algorithm for text classification

High dimensionality of text can be a deterrent in applying complex learners such as Support Vector Machines to the task of text classification. Feature clustering is a powerful alternative to feature selection for reducing the dimensionality of text data. In this paper we propose a new informationtheoretic divisive algorithm for feature/word clustering and apply it to text classification. Existing techniques for such distributional clustering of words are agglomerative in nature and result in (i) sub-optimal word clusters and (ii) high computational cost. In order to explicitly capture the optimality of word clusters in an information theoretic framework, we first derive a global criterion for feature clustering. We then present a fast, divisive algorithm that monotonically decreases this objective function value. We show that our algorithm minimizes the within-cluster Jensen-Shannon divergence while simultaneously maximizing the between-cluster Jensen-Shannon divergence.