Being to new text analytics, I haven't gotten the hang of my typical ML workflow given how long processes take to run in the commonly large feature space of text analytics. I would like to know what the typical strategy is to balance effort/time in terms of optimizing transformation decision, feature down-selection, and model tuning.
To provide a specific example, I have prepared a few different dataframe versions for my text problem:
- Stemmed vs lemmatized
- Count vectorization vs TF-IDF vectorization
- Full feature space vs 30% less features (identified by correlation analysis)
- All the different combinations of the above
In an effort to get a sense of which of the decision points above I should run further tuning on, I ran untuned RF, Logistic, Naive Bayes, SGD, and KNN models on (with cross validation). No clear decision point was commonly "better" in the resulting f-1 scores, and the difference is often noteworthy.
As I have no bias towards a particular algorithm type (only the best f-1 score), I'm stuck in a quandry-- I have not successfully narrowed my decision space enough. Presumably I would run into similar circumstances on other problems.
So what is the typical process? Do I blindly pick a transformation strategy (lemma, stem, count vectors, tfidf) since none are particularly "stronger" and then just jump to tuning, or something else?