A comparison study on multiple binary-class SVM methods for unilabel text categorization

Multiclass support vector machine (SVM) methods are well studied in recent literature. Comparison studies on UCI/statlog multiclass datasets suggest using one-against-one method for multiclass SVM classification. However, in unilabel (multiclass) text categorization with SVMs, no comparison studies exist with one-against-one and other methods, e.g. one-against-all and several well-known improvements to these approaches. In this paper, we bridge this gap by performing empirical comparison of standard one-against-all and one-against-one, together with three improvements to these standard approaches for unilabel text categorization with SVM as base binary learner. We performed all our experiments on three standard text corpuses using two types of document representation. Outcome of our experiments partly support Rifkin and Klautau’s (2004) statement that, for small scale unilabel text categorization tasks, if parameters of the classifiers are well tuned, one-against-all will have better performance than one-against-one and other methods.