Naive Bayes (NB) is an extremely simple and remarkably effective approach to classification learning, but its conditional independence assumption rarely holds true in real-world applications. Attribute weighting is known as a flexible model via assigning each attribute a different weight discriminatively to improve NB. Attribute weighting approaches can fall into two broad categories: filters and wrappers. Wrappers receive a bigger boost in terms of classification accuracy compared with filters, but the time complexity of wrappers is much higher than filters. In order to improve the time complexity of a wrapper, a filter can be used to optimize the initial weight of all attributes as a preprocessing step. So a hybrid attribute weighting approach is proposed in this paper, and the improved model is called correlation-based weight adjusted naive Bayes (CWANB). In CWANB, the correlation-based attribute weighting filter is used to initialize the attribute weights, and then each weight is optimized by the attribute weight adjustment wrapper where the objective function is designed based on dynamic adjustment of attribute weights. Extensive experimental results show that CWANB outperforms NB and some other existing state-of-the-art attribute weighting approaches in terms of the classification accuracy. Meanwhile, compared with the existing wrapper, the CWANB approach reduces the time complexity dramatically. INDEX TERMS Naive Bayes, attribute weighting, weight adjustment, classification.
Abstract:Of numerous proposals to improve the accuracy of naive Bayes by weakening its attribute independence assumption, semi-naive Bayesian classifiers which utilize one-dependence estimators (ODEs) have been shown to be able to approximate the ground-truth attribute dependencies; meanwhile, the probability estimation in ODEs is effective, thus leading to excellent performance. In previous studies, ODEs were exploited directly in a simple way. For example, averaged one-dependence estimators (AODE) weaken the attribute independence assumption by directly averaging all of a constrained class of classifiers. However, all one-dependence estimators in AODE have the same weights and are treated equally. In this study, we propose a new paradigm based on a simple, efficient, and effective attribute value weighting approach, called attribute value weighted average of one-dependence estimators (AVWAODE). AVWAODE assigns discriminative weights to different ODEs by computing the correlation between the different root attribute value and the class. Our approach uses two different attribute value weighting measures: the Kullback-Leibler (KL) measure and the information gain (IG) measure, and thus two different versions are created, which are simply denoted by AVWAODE-KL and AVWAODE-IG, respectively. We experimentally tested them using a collection of 36 University of California at Irvine (UCI) datasets and found that they both achieved better performance than some other state-of-the-art Bayesian classifiers used for comparison.
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