  Text Mining is a field that aims at extracting information from textual data.
One of the challenges of such field of study comes from the pre-processing
stage in which a vector (and structured) representation should be extracted
from unstructured data. The common extraction creates large and sparse vectors
representing the importance of each term to a document. As such, this usually
leads to the curse-of-dimensionality that plagues most machine learning
algorithms. To cope with this issue, in this paper we propose a new supervised
feature extraction and reduction algorithm, named DCDistance, that creates
features based on the distance between a document to a representative of each
class label. As such, the proposed technique can reduce the features set in
more than 99% of the original set. Additionally, this algorithm was also
capable of improving the classification accuracy over a set of benchmark
datasets when compared to traditional and state-of-the-art features selection
algorithms.
