Applying Machine Learning Algorithms for News Articles Categorization: Using SVM and kNN with TF-IDF Approach

Abstract

News articles categorization is a supervised learning approach in which news articles are assigned category labels based on likelihood demonstrated by a training set of labeled articles. A system for automatic categorization of news articles into a standard set of categories has been implemented. The proposed work will use Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) term weighting scheme for optimization of classification techniques to get more optimized results and use two supervised learning approaches, i.e., Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest neighbor (kNN) and compare the performances of both classifiers. Each news document is preprocessed and transformed into a term-document matrix (Tsoumakas et al. in Data mining and knowledge discovery handbook. Springer, Berlin, pp 667–685 (2010) [1]). After preprocessing and transforming each news article into a vector of weights, TF-IDF term weighting scheme was used for weighting the word. TF-IDF weighted the words calculating the number of words that appear in a document. An unknown news item is also transformed into a vector of keyword weights, and then categorized into suitable categories such as Sports, Business, and Science and Technology. The system purposed in research work was trained on the collection of approximately 300 categorized news articles extracted from the various Indian newspaper websites and tested on a different set of 60 randomly extracted news items from the same sources (Trstenjak et al. in Proc Eng 69:1356–1364 (2014) [2], Buana et al. Int J Comput Appl 50:37–42 [3]). It has been observed that the performances of both algorithms improve when TF-IDF approach is used.