A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models for Domain Adaptation in Multiclass Sentiment Classification

Abstract

This study presents a comparative evaluation of machine learning models for domain adaptation in multiclass sentiment classification. While sentiment analysis aims to categorize opinions as positive, neutral, or negative, adapting models across domains remains a significant challenge due to differences in vocabulary, writing style, and sentiment expression. Models trained on a specific domain often fail to generalize effectively to others. To solve this problem, we evaluate how well six models-logistic regression, support vector machine (SVM) with a linear kernel, random forest, convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and BERT-perform on sentiment data from books, beauty & personal care, and automotive categories. The evaluation uses Amazon review data and measures performance via accuracy, F1 score, and Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC). Results indicate that BERT consistently outperforms all other models due to its attention-based transformer architecture, which captures nuanced contextual information across diverse domains. CNN and LSTM models also perform well, particularly in domain-specific settings, with CNN excelling in extracting local features and LSTM in modeling sequential relationships. Traditional models, such as logistic regression and SVM, show limitations in generalizability, while random forest demonstrates stable yet moderate performance. These findings highlight the strengths and trade-offs of each approach for effective cross-domain sentiment classification.