Parsimonious Naive Bayes

We describe our submission to the AAIA´14 Data Mining Competition, where the objective was to reach good predictive performance on text mining classification problems while using a small number of variables. Our submission was ranked 6^th, less than 1% behind the winner. We also present an empirical study on the trade-off between parsimony of the representation and accuracy, and show how good performance can be obtained quickly and efficiently.