Causal Feature Selection with Dimension Reduction for Interpretable Text Classification
This work addresses the need for more principled and interpretable feature selection in text classification, particularly for social science applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing causal methods with dimension reduction.
The paper tackled the problem of selecting interpretable text features for classification by proposing a causal feature selection framework that combines dimension reduction with causal inference, showing promise in improving classification and interpretability on synthetic and real-world data.
Text features that are correlated with class labels, but do not directly cause them, are sometimesuseful for prediction, but they may not be insightful. As an alternative to traditional correlation-basedfeature selection, causal inference could reveal more principled, meaningful relationships betweentext features and labels. To help researchers gain insight into text data, e.g. for social scienceapplications, in this paper we investigate a class of matching-based causal inference methods fortext feature selection. Features used in document classification are often high dimensional, howeverexisting causal feature selection methods use Propensity Score Matching (PSM) which is known to beless effective in high-dimensional spaces. We propose a new causal feature selection framework thatcombines dimension reduction with causal inference to improve text feature selection. Experiments onboth synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the promise of our methods in improving classificationand enhancing interpretability.