  This paper presents the analysis of the impact of a floating-point number
precision reduction on the quality of text classification. The precision
reduction of the vectors representing the data (e.g. TF-IDF representation in
our case) allows for a decrease of computing time and memory footprint on
dedicated hardware platforms. The impact of precision reduction on the
classification quality was performed on 5 corpora, using 4 different
classifiers. Also, dimensionality reduction was taken into account. Results
indicate that the precision reduction improves classification accuracy for most
cases (up to 25% of error reduction). In general, the reduction from 64 to 4
bits gives the best scores and ensures that the results will not be worse than
with the full floating-point representation.
