Selection of optimal hyper-parameter values of support vector machine for sentiment analysis tasks using nature-inspired optimization methods

Sentiment analysis and classification task is used in recommender systems to analyze movie reviews, tweets, Facebook posts, online product reviews, blogs, discussion forums, and online comments in social networks. Usually, the classification is performed using supervised machine learning methods such as support vector machine (SVM) classifier, which have many distinct parameters. The selection of the values for these parameters can greatly influence the classification accuracy and can be addressed as an optimization problem. Here we analyze the use of three heuristics, nature-inspired optimization techniques, cuckoo search optimization (CSO), ant lion optimizer (ALO), and polar bear optimization (PBO), for parameter tuning of SVM models using various kernel functions. We validate our approach for the sentiment classification task of Twitter dataset. The results are compared using classification accuracy metric and the Nemenyi test.