AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTION BASED ON FEATURE SET SUBSPACING ENSEMBLES

Abstract

Authorship attribution can assist the criminal investigation procedure as well as cybercrime analysis. This task can be viewed as a single-label multi-class text categorization problem. Given that the style of a text can be represented as mere word frequencies selected in a language-independent method, suitable machine learning techniques able to deal with high dimensional feature spaces and sparse data can be directly applied to solve this problem. This paper focuses on classifier ensembles based on feature set subspacing. It is shown that an effective ensemble can be constructed using, exhaustive disjoint subspacing, a simple method producing many poor but diverse base classifiers. The simple model can be enhanced by a variation of the technique of cross-validated committees applied to the feature set. Experiments on two benchmark text corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method improving previously reported results and compare it to support vector machines, an alternative suitable machine learning approach to authorship attribution.