Python: Deeper Insights into Machine Learning

Introducing the bag-of-words model

We remember from Chapter 4, Building Good Training Sets – Data Preprocessing, that we have to convert categorical data, such as text or words, into a numerical form before we can pass it on to a machine learning algorithm. In this section, we will introduce the bag-of-words model that allows us to represent text as numerical feature vectors. The idea behind the bag-of-words model is quite simple and can be summarized as follows:

1. We create a vocabulary of unique tokens—for example, words—from the entire set of documents.
2. We construct a feature vector from each document that contains the counts of how often each word occurs in the particular document.

Since the unique words in each document represent only a small ...