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# Text Classification Using Naive Bayes: Theory & A Working Example
In this article, I explain how the Naive Bayes works and I implement a multi-class text classification problem step-by-step in Python.
[Serafeim Loukas, PhD](https://towardsdatascience.com/author/seralouk/)
October 12, 202010 min read
### [Getting Started](https://towardsdatascience.com/tagged/getting-started)
![Figure created by the author.](../images/000.png)
Figure created by the author.
Learn this step by step with the interactive [Computer Science](https://roadmap.sh/computer-science) and [Machine Learning](https://roadmap.sh/machine-learning) roadmaps.
### Table of contents
  1. **Introduction**
  2. **The Naive Bayes algorithm**
  3. **Dealing with text data**
  4. **Working Example in Python (step-by-step guide)**
  5. **Bonus: Having fun with the model**
  6. **Conclusions**


* * *
## 1. Introduction
**Naive Bayes** classifiers are a collection of classification algorithms based on **Bayes' Theorem**. It is not a single algorithm but a family of algorithms where all of them share a common principle, i.e. every pair of features being classified is independent of each other.
**Naive Bayes** classifiers have been heavily used for **text classification** and **text** **analysis** machine learning **problems**.
**Text Analysis** is a major application field for machine learning algorithms. However the raw data, a sequence of symbols (i.e. strings) cannot be fed directly to the algorithms themselves as most of them expect numerical feature vectors with a fixed size rather than the raw text documents with variable length.
In this article I explain a) how **Naive Bayes** works**,** b) how we can use **text** **data** and **fit** them into a **model** after transforming them into a more appropriate form. Finally, I **implement** a **multi-class text classification problem step-by-step in Python**.
Let's get started !!!
* * *
  * **NEW** : After a great deal of hard work and staying behind the scenes for quite a while, we're excited to now offer our expertise through a platform, the "[**Data Science Hub**](https://www.patreon.com/TheDataScienceHub\))" on Patreon (<https://www.patreon.com/TheDataScienceHub>). This hub is our way of providing you with **bespoke consulting services** and comprehensive **responses to all your inquiries** , ranging from Machine Learning to strategic data analytics planning.


* * *
## 2. The Naive Bayes algorithm
Naive Bayes classifiers are a collection of classification algorithms based on **Bayes' Theorem**. It is not a single algorithm but a family of algorithms where all of them share a common principle, i.e. every pair of features being classified is independent of each other.
The dataset is divided into two parts, namely, **feature matrix** and the **response/target vector**.
  * The **Feature** **matrix** (X) contains all the vectors(rows) of the dataset in which each vector consists of the value of **dependent features**. The number of features is **d** i.e. **X = (x1,x2,x2, xd).**
  * The **Response/target** **vector** (y) contains the value of **class/group variable** for **each row of feature matrix.**


### **2.1. The main two assumptions of Naive Bayes**
Naive Bayes assumes that **each feature/variable** of the same class makes an:
  * **independent**
  * **equal**


**contribution to the outcome.**
**Side Note:** The assumptions made by Naive Bayes are not generally correct in real-world situations. In-fact, the independence assumption is often not met and this is why it is called "**Naive** " i.e. because it assumes something that might not be true.
### 2.2. The Bayes' Theorem
Bayes' Theorem finds the probability of an event occurring given the probability of another event that has already occurred. Bayes' theorem is stated mathematically as follows:
![Figure created by the author.](../images/001.png)
Figure created by the author.
where:
  * **A** and **B** are called **events.**
  * P(A | B) is the probability of event A, given the event B is true (has occured). Event B is also termed as **evidence**.
  * P(A) is the **priori** of A (the prior independent probability, i.e. probability of event before evidence is seen).
  * P(B | A) is the probability of B given event A, i.e. probability of event B after evidence A is seen.


### Summary
![Figure created by the author.](../images/002.png)
Figure created by the author.
### 2.3. The Naive Bayes Model
Given a data matrix **X** and a target vector **y,** we state our problem as:
![Figure created by the author.](../images/003.png)
Figure created by the author.
where, **y** is **class variable** and **X** is a **dependent feature vector with dimension d i.e. X = (x1,x2,x2, xd),** where **d** is the number of variables/features of the sample.
  * P(y|X) is the probability of observing the class **y** given the sample **X** with **X = (x1,x2,x2, xd),** where **d** is the number of variables/features of the sample.


Now the "naïve" [conditional independence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence) assumptions come into play: assume that all features in **X** are [mutually independent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_independent), conditional on the category **y** :
![Figure created by the author.](../images/004.png)
Figure created by the author.
Finally, to find the probability of a given **sample** for all possible values of the class variable _**y**_ , we just need to find the output with maximum probability:
![Figure created by the author.](../images/005.png)
Figure created by the author.
* * *
## 3. Dealing with text data
One question that arises at this point is the following:
> How are we going to use the raw text data to train the model ? The raw data is a collection of strings !
Text Analysis is a major application field for machine learning algorithms. **However the raw data, a sequence of symbols (i.e. strings) cannot be fed directly to the algorithms themselves as most of them expect numerical feature vectors with a fixed size rather than the raw text documents with variable length.**
In order to address this, scikit-learn provides utilities for the most common ways to extract numerical features from text content, namely:
  * **tokenizing** strings and giving an integer id for each possible token, for instance by using white-spaces and punctuation as token separators.
  * **counting** the occurrences of tokens in each document.


In this scheme, features and samples are defined as follows:
  * each **individual token occurrence frequency** is treated as a **feature**.
  * the vector of all the token frequencies for a given **document** is considered a multivariate **sample**.


### "Counting" Example (to really understand this before we move on):
text

```
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
corpus = [
    'This is the first document.',
    'This document is the second document.',
    'And this is the third one.',
    'Is this the first document?',
]
```

text

```
vectorizer = CountVectorizer()
X = vectorizer.fit_transform(corpus)
```

text

```
print(vectorizer.get_feature_names())
['and', 'document', 'first', 'is', 'one', 'second', 'the', 'third', 'this']
```

text

```
print(X.toarray())
[[0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1]
 [0 2 0 1 0 1 1 0 1]
 [1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1]
 [0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1]]
```

In the above toy example, we have a collection of strings stored into the variable **corpus.** Using the **text** **transformer** , we can see that we have a specific number of unique strings (vocabulary) in our data.
This can be seen by printing the **vectorizer.get_feature_names()** variable**.** We observe that we have **9 unique words**.
Next, we printed the transformed data (**X**) and **we observe the following** :
  * We have 4 rows in X as the number of our text strings (**we have the same number of samples after the transformation**).
  * **We have the same number of columns** (features/variables) in the transformed data (**X**) f**or all the samples (** this was not the case before that transformation i.e. the individual strings had different lengths).
  * The values 0,1,2, encode the **frequency** of a **word** that **appeared** in the **initial text data.**


**E.g**. The first transformed row is **[0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1]** and **** th** e unique vocabulary**i** s ['and', 'document', 'first', 'is', 'one', 'second', 'the', 'third', 'this'],** thus this means that the words "document", "first", "is", "the" and "this" appeared 1 time each in the initial text string (i.e. 'This is the first document.').
**Side note:** This is the counting approach. The [term-frequency transform](https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.feature_extraction.text.TfidfTransformer.html#sklearn.feature_extraction.text.TfidfTransformer) is nothing more than a transformation of a count matrix into a normalized term-frequency matrix.
Hope everything is clear now. If not, read this paragraph as many times as it is needed in order to really grasp the idea and understand this transformation. **It is a fundamental step.**
* * *
## 4. Working example in Python
Now that you understood how the Naive Bayes and the Text Transformation work, it's time to start coding !
### Problem Statement
As a working example, we will use some **text** **data** and we will build a **Naive** **Bayes** model to **predict** the **categories** of the **texts**. This is a **multi-class (20 classes) text classification problem**.
Let's start (I will walk you through). First, we will **load all the necessary libraries** :
text

```
import numpy as np, pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.datasets import fetch_20newsgroups
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
from sklearn.naive_bayes import MultinomialNB
from sklearn.pipeline import make_pipeline
from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix, accuracy_score
```

text

```
sns.set() # use seaborn plotting style
```

Next, **let's load the data** (**training** and **test** sets):
text

```
# Load the dataset
data = fetch_20newsgroups()
```

text

```
# Get the text categories
text_categories = data.target_names
```

text

```
# define the training set
train_data = fetch_20newsgroups(subset="train", categories=text_categories)
```

text

```
# define the test set
test_data = fetch_20newsgroups(subset="test", categories=text_categories)
```

Let's find out **how many classes** and **samples** we have:
text

```
print("We have {} unique classes".format(len(text_categories)))
print("We have {} training samples".format(len(train_data.data)))
print("We have {} test samples".format(len(test_data.data)))
```

The above prints:
text

```
We have 20 unique classes
We have 11314 training samples
We have 7532 test samples
```

So, this is a **20-class text classification problem** with n_train = **11314** **training** **samples** (text sentences) and n_test = **7532** **test** **samples** (text sentences).
Let's visualize the 5th training sample:
text

```
# let's have a look as some training data
print(test_data.data[5])
```

As mentioned previously, our data are **texts** (more specifically, **emails**) so you should see something like the following printed out:
![Figure created by the author.](../images/006.png)
Figure created by the author.
The next step consists of building the **Naive Bayes classifier** and finally **training** the **model.** In our example, we will convert the collection of text documents (train and test sets) into a matrix of token counts (I explained how this works in **Section 3**).
> To implement that text transformation we will use the **make_pipeline** function. This will internally transform the text data and then the model will be fitted **using the transformed data**.
text

```
# Build the model
model = make_pipeline(TfidfVectorizer(), MultinomialNB())
```

text

```
# Train the model using the training data
model.fit(train_data.data, train_data.target)
```

text

```
# Predict the categories of the test data
predicted_categories = model.predict(test_data.data)
```

The last line of code **predicts the labels of the test set**.
Let's see the predicted categories names:
text

```
print(np.array(test_data.target_names)[predicted_categories])
array(['rec.autos', 'sci.crypt', 'alt.atheism', ..., 'rec.sport.baseball', 'comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware', 'soc.religion.christian'], dtype='<U24')
```

Finally, let's build the **multi-class confusion matrix** to see if the model is good or if the model predicts correctly only specific text categories.
text

```
# plot the confusion matrix
mat = confusion_matrix(test_data.target, predicted_categories)
sns.heatmap(mat.T, square = True, annot=True, fmt = "d", xticklabels=train_data.target_names,yticklabels=train_data.target_names)
plt.xlabel("true labels")
plt.ylabel("predicted label")
plt.show()
```

text

```
print("The accuracy is {}".format(accuracy_score(test_data.target, predicted_categories)))
```

text

```
The accuracy is 0.7738980350504514
```

![Figure created by the author.](../images/007.png)
Figure created by the author.
* * *
**Note:** If you're passionate about diving deeper into machine learning with Python and sklearn, I highly recommend checking out [**this book**](https://amzn.to/3t4YB2d); it's a game-changer in breaking down complex topics into digestible insights.
> [**Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques...**](https://amzn.to/3t4YB2d)
## 5. Bonus: Having fun with the model
Let's have some fun using the trained model. Let's classify whatever sentence we like 😄 .
text

```
# custom function to have fun
def my_predictions(my_sentence, model):
    all_categories_names = np.array(data.target_names)
    prediction = model.predict([my_sentence])
    return all_categories_names[prediction]
```

text

```

my_sentence = "jesus"
print(my_predictions(my_sentence, model))
['soc.religion.christian']
```

text

```
my_sentence = "Are you an atheist?"
print(my_predictions(my_sentence, model))
['alt.atheism']
```

We inserted the string "jesus" to the model and it predicted the class "['soc.religion.christian']".
Change the "my_sentence" into other stings and **play with the model** 😃 .
* * *
## 6. Conclusions
We saw that **Naive Bayes is a very powerful algorithm** for **multi-class text classification problems.**
_**Side Note**_ : _If you want to know more about the confusion matrix (and the ROC curve) read this:_
> [**ROC Curve Explained using a COVID-19 hypothetical example: Binary & Multi-Class Classification...**](https://towardsdatascience.com/roc-curve-explained-using-a-covid-19-hypothetical-example-binary-multi-class-classification-bab188ea869c)
### Interpreting the confusion matrix
From the above **confusion** **matrix** , we can verify that the model is really good.
  * It is able to correctly predict all 20 classes of the text data (most values are on the diagonal and few are off-the-diagonal).
  * We also notice that the highest miss-classification (value off-the-diagonal) is **131** (5 lines from the end, last column at the right). The value 131 means that 131 documents that belonged to the "**religion miscellaneous** " category were miss-classified as belonging to the "**religion christian** " category.


Interesting thing that these 2 categories are really similar and actually one could characterize these as 2 subgroups of a larger group e.g. "religion" in general.
Finally, the **accuracy** on the **test** set is **0.7739** which is quite good for a **20-class text classification problem** 🚀 .
**That's all folks! Hope you liked this article.**
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If you liked and found this article useful, **follow 👣** me to be able to see all my new posts.
Questions? Post them as a comment and I will reply as soon as possible.
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### My Profile (have a look to find out about my collection of articles):
> [**Serafeim Loukas - Towards Data Science**](https://towardsdatascience.com/@seralouk)
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## Get in touch with me
  * **LinkedIn** : <https://www.linkedin.com/in/serafeim-loukas/>


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> [**Support Vector Machines (SVM) clearly explained: A python tutorial for classification problems...**](https://towardsdatascience.com/support-vector-machines-svm-clearly-explained-a-python-tutorial-for-classification-problems-29c539f3ad8)
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## [Serafeim Loukas, PhD](https://towardsdatascience.com/author/seralouk/)
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