Document Classification Using a Finite Mixture Model

Abstract

We propose a new method of classifying documents into categories. The simple method of conducting hypothesis testing over word-based distributions in categories suffers from the data sparseness problem. In order to address this difficulty, Guthrie et.al. have developed a method using distributions based on hard clustering of words, i.e., in which a word is assigned to a single cluster and words in the same cluster are treated uniformly. This method might, however, degrade classification results, since the distributions it employs are not always precise enough for representing the differences between categories. We propose here the use of soft clustering of words, i.e., in which a word can be assigned to several different clusters and each cluster is characterized by a specific word probability distribution. We define for each document category a finite mixture model, which is a linear combination of the probability distributions of the clusters. We thereby treat the problem of classifying documents as that of conducting statistical hypothesis testing over finite mixture models. In order to accomplish this testing, we employ the EM algorithm which helps efficiently estimate parameters in a finite mixture model. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms not only the method using distributions based on hard clustering, but also the method using word-based distributions and the method based on cosine-similarity.