EXPERIMENTS WITH SKLEARN

DATA PRE-PROCESSING

• Each product is represented by its 'Title' and 'Description'. There are 209 classes into which a given product can be classified. This is not a multilabel classification problem, so each product has to be assigned one out of the 209 classes only
• The data was cleaned by removing stopwords, punctuations and special characters from the text

FEATURE EXTRACTION

• Each product is represented by a document, which is it's Title and Description combined
• The cleaned up data is represented as TFIDF vectors
• Only unigram tokens are a part of the vocabulary, as it was observed that n-gram tokens led to a slight drop in classification accuracy
• Limiting the vocabulary size by setting parameters such as max_df (frequency of word occurrence across the dataset) further boosts classifier performance by a small margin
• Dimensionality reduction through PCA (Truncated SVD in this case, because TFIDF features are sparse) dropped the precision by a few points, and so it was decided to retain the original dimensionality of the TFIDF vectors

CLASSIFIERS

• Naive Bayes

  • Multinomial Naive Bayes serves as a quick baseline, achieving 75% precision with very low training time

• SVM

  • The classifier used here is a linear SVM, as it was observed that an RBF or polynomial kernel doesn't perform well
  • The classifier achieves 83% precision
  • While this is the best performing classifier, it also requires the longest training and prediction time among the ones listed here

• SGD

  • This classifier achieves 81% precision, but at the same time is a lot faster than the SVM
  • The optimal loss function is 'modified huber loss'

• Multilayer Perceptron

  • This classifer achieves 79% precision, when optimized using LBFGS
  • The MLP might perform better than the SVM as data size grows

• Voting Classifier

  • Linear SVM and SGD are used to provide two votes, and both the votes are given equal weights
  • This classifier achieves 82% accuracy, and takes a longer time to train than any individual classifier

• Random Forests

  • This classifier achieves 75% precision at best
  • It also requires high training time