{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Using Text Classifiers for Numerical Classification","authors":[{"name":"Sofus A. Macskassy","slug":"sofus-a-macskassy","given":"Sofus A.","family":"Macskassy","affiliation":""},{"name":"Haym Hirsh","slug":"haym-hirsh","given":"Haym","family":"Hirsh","affiliation":""},{"name":"Arunava Banerjee","slug":"arunava-banerjee","given":"Arunava","family":"Banerjee","affiliation":""},{"name":"Aynur A. Dayanik","slug":"aynur-a-dayanik","given":"Aynur A.","family":"Dayanik","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Consider a supervised learning problem in which examples contain both numerical- and text-valued features. To use traditional featurevector-based learning methods, one could treat the presence or absence of a word as a Boolean feature and use these binary-valued features together with the numerical features. However, the use of a text-classification system on this is a bit more problematic — in the most straight-forward approach each number would be considered a distinct token and treated as a word. This paper presents an alternative approach for the use of text classification methods for supervised learning problems with numerical-valued features in which the numerical features are converted into bag-of-words features, thereby making them directly usable by text classification methods. We show that even on purely numerical-valued data the results of textclassification on the derived text-like representation outperforms the more naive numbers-as-tokens representation and, more importantly, is competitive with mature numerical classification methods such as C4.5 and Ripper.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/121","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/0121.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/121.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/bibtex/121","volume":{"slug":"2001","title":"Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2001","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2001/","year":2001,"location":"Seattle, Washington, USA","dates":"","editors":"","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":121,"pages":{"first":885,"last":889},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}