I'm looking to use some tweets about measles/ the mmr vaccine to see how sentiment about vaccination changes over time. I plan on creating the training set from the corpus of data I currently have (unless someone has a recommendation on where I can get similar data).
I would like to classify a tweet as either: Pro-vaccine, Anti-Vaccine, or Neither (these would be factual tweets about outbreaks).
So the question is: How big is big enough? I want to avoid problems of overfitting (so I'll do a test train split) but as I include more and more tweets, the number of features needing to be learned increases dramatically.
I was thinking 1000 tweets (333 of each). Any input is appreciated here, and if you could recommend some resources, that would be great too.
More is always better. 1000 tweets on a 3-way split seems quite ambitious, I would even consider 1000 per class for a 3-way split on tweets quite low. Label as many as you can within a feasible amount of time.
Also, it might be worth taking a cascaded approach (esp. with so little data), i.e. label a set vaccine vs non-vaccine, and within the vaccine subset you'd have a pro vs anti set.
In my experience trying to model a catch-all "neutral" class, that contains everything that is not explicitly "pro" or "anti" is quite difficult because there is so much noise. Especially with simpler models such as Naive Bayes, I have found the cascaded approach to be working quite well.
Related
I have a question is there already any free dataset available to test doc2vec and if in case I wanted to create my own dataset what could be an appropriate way to do it.
Assuming you mean the 'Paragraph Vectors' algorithm, which is often called Doc2Vec, any textual dataset is a potential test/demo dataset.
The original papers by the creators of Doc2Vec showed results from applying it to:
movie reviews
search engine summary snippets
Wikipedia articles
scientific articles from Arxiv
People have also used it on…
titles of articles/books
abstracts of larger articles
full news articles or scientific papers
tweets
blogposts or social media posts
resumes
When learning, it's best to pick very simple, common datasets when you're 1st starting, and then larger datasets that you somewhat understand or are related to your areas of interest – if you don't already have a sufficient project-related dataset.
Note that the algorithm, like others in the [something]2vec family of algorithms, works best with lots of varied training data – many tens of thousands of unique words each with many contrasting usage examples, over many tens of thousands (or many more) of documents.
If you crank the vector_size way down, & the training-epochs way up, you can eke some hints of its real performance out of smaller datasets of a few hundred contrasting documents. For example, in the Python Gensim library's Doc2Vec intro-tutorial & test-cases, a tiny set of 300 news-summaries (from about 20 years ago called the 'Lee Corpus') are used, and each text is only a few hundreds words long.
But the vector_size is reduced to 50 – much smaller than the hundreds-of-dimensions typical with larger training data, and perhaps still too many dimensions for such a small amount of data. And, the training epochs is increased to 40, much larger than the default of 5 or typical Doc2Vec choices in published papers of 10-20 epochs. And even with those changes, with such little data & textual variety, the effect of moving similar documents to similar vector coordinates will be appear weaker to human review, & be less consistent between runs, than a better dataset will usually show (albeit using many more minutes/hours of training time).
I am using K-means for topic modelling using Word2Vec and would like to understand the implications of vectorizing up to, let's say, 10 dimensions, against embedding it with 200 dimensions and then using PCA to get down to 10. Does the second approach make sense at all?
Which one worked better for your specific purposes, & your specific data, after trying both & comparing the end-results against each other, either in some ad-hoc ("eyeballing") or rigorous way?
There's no reason to prematurely reject any approach, given how many details about your data & ultimate end-goals are unstated.
It would be atypical to train a word2vec model to have only 10 dimensions. Published work most often shows the use of 100 to 1000 dimensions, often 300 or 400, assuming you've got enough bulk training data to make the algorithm worthwhile.
(Word2vec needs a lot of varied training text, with many contrasting usage examples for every word of interest, to generate good results. You may occasionally see toy-sized demos, on smaller amounts of data, just to quickly show steps, or some major qualities of the results. But good results, in the aspects for which word2vec is most appreciated, depend on plentiful training data.)
Also, whether or not your aims would be helped by the extra step of PCA to reduce the dimensionality of a larger word2vec model seems another separable question, to be determined experimentally by comparing results with and without that step, on your actual data/problem, rather than guessed at from intuitions from other projects that might not be comparable.
My machine learning goal is to search for potential risks (will cost more money) and opportunities (will save money) from a Project Requirements document.
My idea is to classify sentences from the data into one of these categories: Risk, Opportunity and Irrelevant (no risk, no opportunity, default categorie).
I will use a multinomial Bayes classifier for this with tf-dif.
Now I need to have data for my training set and test set. The way I will do this is label every sentence from requirement documents with 1 of the 3 categories. Is this a good approach?
Or should I only label sentences which are obviously a risk/opportunity/irrelevant?
Also, is the Irrelevant categorie a good idea?
I believe the three-class approach is a good one. This is similar to sentiment analysis, where you typically have positive, negative and neutral documents (or sentences). The neutral comprises the vast majority of the instances, so your classification problem will be unbalanced. That is not necessarily an issue, but for difficult problems like this one, a naive bayes classifier might simply classify everything in the neutral/irrelevant bucket since the prior for neutral will be quite high.
your sampling (labeling) should be representative of the reality. Don't try to create a dataset of 1000 risk, 1000 opportunity, 1000 irrelevant. Instead, take a sample of say 10000 requirements, and assign the proper label to each, even if it means having much more 'Irrelevant' than 'Risk' for instance.
text classification models require many instances, since the search space is vast. I wonder if you have considered the fact that to get reliable results (say over 90%), you may need to manually label thousands of instances.
and even if you have thousands of training instances, your problem looks particularly difficult, unless there are some obvious keywords to trigger 'risk' or 'opportunity' that I don't understand. Ask yourself: would this be easy for a human to judge? If you asked 3 judges to classify your requirements, would they all come up with the same answer? If not, then it might be 10s of thousands of training documents that you will need, and the classification accuracy may still be disappointing.
I just wanted to understand (from your experience), that if I have to create a sentiment analysis classification model (using NLTK), what would be a good training data size. For instance if my training data is going to contain tweets, and I intend to classify them as positive,negative and neutral, how many tweets each should I ideally have per category to get a reasonable model working?
I understand that there are many parameters like quality of data, but if one has to get started what might be a good number.
That's a really hard question to answer for people who are not familiar with the exact data, its labelling and the application you want to use it for. But as a ballpark estimate, I would say start with 1,000 examples of each and go from there.
Background
For years I've been using my own Bayesian-like methods to categorize new items from external sources based on a large and continually updated training dataset.
There are three types of categorization done for each item:
30 categories, where each item must belong to one category, and at most two categories.
10 other categories, where each item is only associated with a category if there is a strong match, and each item can belong to as many categories as match.
4 other categories, where each item must belong to only one category, and if there isn't a strong match the item is assigned to a default category.
Each item consists of English text of around 2,000 characters. In my training dataset there are about 265,000 items, which contain a rough estimate of 10,000,000 features (unique three word phrases).
My homebrew methods have been fairly successful, but definitely have room for improvement. I've read the NLTK book's chapter "Learning to Classify Text", which was great and gave me a good overview of NLP classification techniques. I'd like to be able to experiment with different methods and parameters until I get the best classification results possible for my data.
The Question
What off-the-shelf NLP tools are available that can efficiently classify such a large dataset?
Those I've tried so far:
NLTK
TIMBL
I tried to train them with a dataset that consisted of less than 1% of the available training data: 1,700 items, 375,000 features. For NLTK I used a sparse binary format, and a similarly compact format for TIMBL.
Both seemed to rely on doing everything in memory, and quickly consumed all system memory. I can get them to work with tiny datasets, but nothing large. I suspect that if I tried incrementally adding the training data the same problem would occur either then or when doing the actual classification.
I've looked at Google's Prediction API, which seem to do much of what I'm looking for but not everything. I'd also like to avoid relying on an external service if possible.
About the choice of features: in testing with my homebrew methods over the years, three word phrases produced by far the best results. Although I could reduce the number of features by using words or two word phrases, that would most likely produce inferior results and would still be a large number of features.
After this post and based on the personal experience, I would recommend Vowpal Wabbit. It is said to have one of the fastest text classification algorithms.
MALLET has a number of classifiers (NB, MaxEnt, CRF, etc). It's written Andrew McCallum's group. SVMLib is another good option, but SVM models typically require a bit more tuning than MaxEnt. Alternatively some sort of online clustering like K-means might not be bad in this case.
SVMLib and MALLET are quite fast (C and Java) once you have your model trained. Model training can take a while though! Unfortunately it's not always easy to find example code. I have some examples of how to use MALLET programmatically (along with the Stanford Parser, which is slow and probably overkill for your purposes). NLTK is a great learning tool and is simple enough that is you can prototype what you are doing there, that's ideal.
NLP is more about features and data quality than which machine learning method you use. 3-grams might be good, but how about character n-grams across those? Ie, all the character ngrams in a 3-gram to account for spelling variations/stemming/etc? Named entities might also be useful, or some sort of lexicon.
I would recommend Mahout as it is intended for handling very large scale data sets.
The ML algorithms are built over Apache Hadoop(map/reduce), so scaling is inherent.
Take a look at classification section below and see if it helps.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Algorithms
Have you tried MALLET?
I can't be sure that it will handle your particular dataset but I've found it to be quite robust in previous tests of mine.
However, I my focus was on topic modeling rather than classification per se.
Also, beware that with many NLP solutions you needn't input the "features" yourself (as the N-grams, i.e. the three-words-phrases and two-word-phrases mentioned in the question) but instead rely on the various NLP functions to produce their own statistical model.