Predicting numeric ratings for Google apps using text features and ensemble learning

• Published in: ETRI journal Vol. 43; no. 1; pp. 95 - 108
• Main Authors: Umer, Muhammad, Ashraf, Imran, Mehmood, Arif, Ullah, Saleem, Choi, Gyu Sang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Korean
• Published: 한국전자통신연구원 10.02.2021; ETRI
• Subjects: ensemble learning; Google app rating; opinion mining; text mining; text features; data mining
• ISSN: 1225-6463; 2233-7326

Application (app) ratings are feedback provided voluntarily by users and serve as important evaluation criteria for apps. However, these ratings can often be biased owing to insufficient or missing votes. Additionally, significant differences have been observed between numeric ratings and user reviews. This study aims to predict the numeric ratings of Google apps using machine learning classifiers. It exploits numeric app ratings provided by users as training data and returns authentic mobile app ratings by analyzing user reviews. An ensemble learning model is proposed for this purpose that considers term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF/IDF) features. Three TF/IDF features, including unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams, were used. The dataset was scraped from the Google Play store, extracting data from 14 different app categories. Biased and unbiased user ratings were discriminated using TextBlob analysis to formulate the ground truth, from which the classifier prediction accuracy was then evaluated. The results demonstrate the high potential for machine learning-based classifiers to predict authentic numeric ratings based on actual user reviews.