Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Augmenting Naive Bayes Classifiers With Statistical Language Models, Fuchun Peng

Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series

We augment naive Bayes models with statistical n-gram language models to address short- comings of the standard naive Bayes text classifier. The result is a generalized naive Bayes classifier which allows for a local Markov dependence among observations; a model we re- fer to as the Chain Augmented Naive Bayes (CAN) Bayes classifier. CAN models have two advantages over standard naive Bayes classifiers. First, they relax some of the indepen- dence assumptions of naive Bayes—allowing a local Markov chain dependence in the observed variables—while still permitting efficient inference and learning. Second, they permit straight- forward application of sophisticated smoothing techniques …