METHODS: For experiments, the autopsy reports belonging to eight different causes of death were collected, preprocessed and converted into 43 master feature vectors using various schemes for feature extraction, representation, and reduction. The six different text classification techniques were applied on these 43 master feature vectors to construct a classification model that can predict the cause of death. Finally, classification model performance was evaluated using four performance measures i.e. overall accuracy, macro precision, macro-F-measure, and macro recall.

RESULTS: From experiments, it was found that that unigram features obtained the highest performance compared to bigram, trigram, and hybrid-gram features. Furthermore, in feature representation schemes, term frequency, and term frequency with inverse document frequency obtained similar and better results when compared with binary frequency, and normalized term frequency with inverse document frequency. Furthermore, the chi-square feature reduction approach outperformed Pearson correlation, and information gain approaches. Finally, in text classification algorithms, support vector machine classifier outperforms random forest, Naive Bayes, k-nearest neighbor, decision tree, and ensemble-voted classifier.