Live and learn from mistakes: A lightweight system for document classification

► Text processing. ► Clusterheads leashed to class centroids. ► Online learning with negative feedback. ► A lightweight well-performing system for online document classification is proposed. We present a Life-Long Learning from Mistakes (3LM) algorithm for document classification, which could be used in various scenarios such as spam filtering, blog classification, and web resource categorization. We extend the ideas of online clustering and batch-mode centroid-based classification to online learning with negative feedback. The 3LM is a competitive learning algorithm, which avoids over-smoothing, characteristic of the centroid-based classifiers, by using a different class representative, which we call clusterhead. The clusterheads competing for vector-space dominance are drawn toward misclassified documents, eventually bringing the model to a “balanced state” for a fixed distribution of documents. Subsequently, the clusterheads oscillate between the misclassified documents, heuristically minimizing the rate of misclassifications, an NP-complete problem. Further, the 3LM algorithm prevents over-fitting by “leashing” the clusterheads to their respective centroids. A clusterhead provably converges if its class can be separated by a hyper-plane from all other classes. Lifelong learning with fixed learning rate allows 3LM to adapt to possibly changing distribution of the data and continually learn and unlearn document classes. We report on our experiments, which demonstrate high accuracy of document classification on Reuters21578, OHSUMED, and TREC07p-spam datasets. The 3LM algorithm did not show over-fitting, while consistently outperforming centroid-based, Naïve Bayes, C4.5, AdaBoost, kNN, and SVM whose accuracy had been reported on the same three corpora.