Abstract
Text classification is one domain in which the naive Bayesian (NB) learning algorithm performs remarkably well. However, making further improvement in performance using ensemble-building techniques proved to be a challenge because NB is a stable algorithm. This work shows that, while an ensemble of NB classifiers achieves little or no improvement in terms of classification accuracy, an ensemble of fine-tuned NB classifiers can achieve a remarkable improvement in accuracy. We propose a fine-tuning algorithm for text classification that is both more accurate and less stable than the NB algorithm and the fine-tuning NB (FTNB) algorithm. This improvement makes it more suitable than the FTNB algorithm for building ensembles of classifiers using bagging. Our empirical experiments, using 16-benchmark text-classification data sets, show significant improvement for most data sets.