MSVM-kNN: Combining SVM and k-NN for Multi-class Text Classification

Text categorization is the process of assigning documents to a set of previously fixed categories. It is widely used in many data-oriented management applications. Many popular algorithms for text categorization have been proposed, such as Naive Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM). However, those classification approaches do not perform well in every case, for example, SVM can not identify categories of documents correctly when the texts are in cross zones of multi-categories, k-NN cannot effectively solve the problem of overlapped categories borders. In this paper, we propose an approach named as Multi-class SVM-kNN (MSVM-kNN) which is the combination of SVM and k-NN. In the approach, SVM is first used to identify category borders, then k-NN classifies documents among borders. MSVM-kNN can overcome the shortcomings of SVM and k-NN and improve the performance of multi-class text classification. The experimental results show MSVM-kNN performs better than SVM or kNN.