Trying to get my feet wet with machine learning on text.
The most common dataset I've seen in this space is the sms dataset with classes ham and spam.
And the most common and successful approach seems to be to model this as a binary classification problem and to use a multinomial naïve Bayes to solve it.
However I'm trying to understand why this is a binary classification problem.
I understand that the spam category has some common features associated with it across the class - such as ads, offers , free discounts and so on.
But there's no definition for what is a ham class is there? The definition of ham is - everything other than spam.
So why is this a binary classification task?
For more context - I'm trying to solve the problem of whether a news article belongs to the politics class or to the non-political class.
Suppose I have a labelled dataset of around 3000 samples in each class.
The non political class is a mix of classes like sports , religion , science and technology and miscellaneous.
Will a binary classifier work better than an algorithm such as oneclassSVM where anything other than political news is an outlier ?
What are some of the other algorithms that I can use to solve this problem? I have heard about PU learning but I haven't seen any implementations of algorithms in any machine learning libraries ( I'm working with python)
If any of you have experience doing class modelling on text. Please share your comments and insights
Thank you!