: Dimensionality reduction is a crucial task in text classification. The most
adopted strategy is feature selection using filter methods. This approach presents
a difficulty in determining the best size for the final feature vector. At Least One
FeaTure (ALOFT), Maximum f Features per Document (MFD), Maximum f Features per Document-Reduced (MFDR) and Class-dependent Maximum f Features per
Document-Reduced (cMFDR) are feature selection methods that define automatically
the number of features per Corpus. However, MFD, MFDR, and cMFDR require a
parameter that defines the number of features to be selected per document. Automatic
Feature Subsets Analyzer (AFSA) is an auxiliary method that automates such configuration. In this paper, we evaluate dimensionality reduction, classification performance
and execution time of this family of methods: ALOFT, MFD, MFDR, cMFDR and
AFSA. The experiments are conducted using three feature evaluation functions and
twenty databases. MFD obtained the best results among the feature selection methods. In addition, the experiments showed that the use of AFSA does not significantly
affect the classification performances or the dimensionality reduction rates of the feature selection methods, but considerably reduces their execution times.