Feature selection for event discovery in social media: A comparative study

Microblog as one kind of typical social media has many research implications in social event discovery and social-media-based e-learning and collaborative learning. At present, researchers usually employ feature-based classification approaches to detect social events in microblogs. However, it is very common to get different results when different features are used in event discovery. Therefore, it has been a critical issue how to select appropriate features for event discovery in microblogs. In this paper, we analyze five different feature selection methods and present an improved method for selecting features for microblog-based event discovery. We compare all the methods on a real microblog dataset in terms of various metrics including precision, recall, and F-measure. And finally we discuss the best feature selection method for the event discovery in microblogs. To the best of our knowledge, there are no such comparative studies on feature selection for event discovery in social media, and this paper is expected to offer some useful references for the future research and applications on the event discovery in microblogs.