Last time, I went through some basics of how naive Bayes algorithm works, and the logic behind it, and implemented the classifier myself, as well as using the NLTK. That’s great and all, and hopefully people reading it got a better understanding of what was going on, and possibly how to play along with classification for their own text documents.

But if you’re looking to train and actually deploy a model, say, a website where people can copy paste reviews from Amazon and see how our classifier performs, you’re going to want to use a library like Scikit-Learn. So with this post, I’ll walk through training a Scikit-Learn model, testing various classifiers and parameters, in order to see how we do, and also at the end, will have an initial, version 1, of a Amazon review classifier that we can use in a production setting.

Some notes before we get going:

• For a lot of the testing, I only use 5 or 10 of the full 26 classes that are in the dataset.
• Keep in mind, that what works here might not be the same for other data sets. We’re specifically looking at Amazon product reviews. For a different set of texts (you’ll also see the word corpus being thrown around), a different classifier, or parameter sets might be used.
• The resulting classifier we come up with is, well, really really basic, and probably what we’d guess would perform the best if we guessed what would be the best at the onset. All the time and effort that goes into checking all the combinations
• I’m going to mention here this good post that popped up when I was looking around for other people who wrote about this. It really nicely outlines going how to classify text with Scikit-learn. To reduce redundancy, something that we all should work towards, I’m going to point you to that article to get up to speed on Scikit-learn and how it can apply to text. In this article, I’m going to start at the end of that article, where we’re working with Scikit-learn pipelines.

As always, you can say hi on twitter, or yell at me there for messing up as well if you want.

How many grams?

First step to think about is how we want to represent the reviews in naive Bayes world, in this case, a bag of words / n-grams. In the other post, I simply used word counts since I wasn’t going into how to make the best model we could have. But besides word counts, we can also bump up the representations to include something called a bigram, which is a two word combos. The idea behind that is that there’s information in two word combos that we aren’t using with just single words. With Scikit-learn, this is very simple to do, and they take care of it for you. Oh, and besides bigrams, we can say we want trigrams, fourgrams, etc. Which we’ll do, to see if that improves performance. Take a look at the wikipedia article for n-grams here.

For example is if a review mentions “coconut oil cream”, as in some sort of face cream (yup, I actually saw this as a mis-classified review), simply using the words and we might get a classification of food since we just see “coconut” “oil” and “cream”. But if we use bigrams as well as the unigrams, we’re also using “coconut oil” and “oil cream” as information. Now this might not get us all the way to a classification of beauty, but it could tip us over the edge.

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