Sentiment Analysis Using Cuckoo Search for Optimized Feature Selection on Kaggle Tweets

Selecting the optimal set of features to determine sentiment in online textual content is imperative for superior classification results. Optimal feature selection is computationally hard task and fosters the need for devising novel techniques to improve the classifier performance. In this work, the binary adaptation of cuckoo search (nature inspired, meta-heuristic algorithm) known as the Binary Cuckoo Search is proposed for the optimum feature selection for a sentiment analysis of textual online content. The baseline supervised learning techniques such as SVM, etc., have been firstly implemented with the traditional tf-idf model and then with the novel feature optimization model. Benchmark Kaggle dataset, which includes a collection of tweets is considered to report the results. The results are assessed on the basis of performance accuracy. Empirical analysis validates that the proposed implementation of a binary cuckoo search for feature selection optimization in a sentiment analysis task outperforms the elementary supervised algorithms based on the conventional tf-idf score.