Why does KNN algorithm perform better on Word2Vec than on TF-IDF vector representation?
By using the external word-vectors, you've introduced extra info about the words to the word2vec-derived features – info that simply may not be deducible at all to the plain word-occurrece (TF-IDF) model.
For example, imagine just a single review in your train set, and another single review in your test set, use some less-common word for car like jalopy – but then zero other car-associated words.
A TFIDF model will have a weight for that unique term in a particular slot - but may have no other hints in the training dataset that jalopy is related to cars at all. In TFIDF space, that weight will just make those 2 reviews more-distant from all other reviews (which have a 0.0 in that dimension). It doesn't help or hurt much. A review 'nice jalopy' will be no closer to 'nice car' than it is to 'nice movie'.
On the other hand, if the GoogleNews has a vector for that word, and that vector is fairly close to car, auto, wheels, etc, then reviews with all those words will be shifted a little in the same direction in the word2vec-space, giving an extra hint to some classifiers, especially, perhaps the KNN one. Now, 'nice jalopy' is quite a bit closer to 'nice car' than to 'nice movie' or most other 'nice [X]' reviews.
Using word-vectors from an outside source may not have great coverage of your dataset's domain words. (Words in GoogleNews, from a circa-2013 training run on news articles, might miss both words, and word-senses in your alternative & more-recent reviews.) And, summarizing a text by averaging all its words is a very crude method: it can learn nothing from word-ordering/grammar (that can often reverse intended sense), and aspects of words may all cancel-out/dilute each other in longer texts.
But still, it's bringing in more language info that otherwise wouldn't be in the data at all, so in some cases it may help.
If your dataset is sufficiently large, training your own word-vectors may help a bit, too. (Though, the gain you've seen so far suggests some useful patterns of word-similarities may not be well-taught from your limited dataset.)
Of course also note that you can use blended techniques. Perhaps, each text can be even better-represented by a concatenation of the N TF-IDF dimensions and the M word2vec-average dimensions. (If your texts have many  significany 2-word phrases that mean hings different than the individual words, adding in word 2-grams features may help. If your texts have many typos or rare word variants that still share word-roots with other words, than adding in character-n-grams – word fragments – may help.)
I am doing a project on multi-class text classification and could do with some advice.
I have a dataset of reviews which are classified into 7 product categories.
Firstly, I create a term document matrix using TF-IDF (tfidfvectorizer from sklearn). This generates a matrix of n x m where n in the number of reviews in my dataset and m is the number of features.
Then after splitting term document matrix into 80:20 train:test, I pass it through the K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) algorithm and achieve an accuracy of 53%.
In another experiment, I used the Google News Word2Vec pretrained embedding (300 dimensional) and averaged all the word vectors for each review. So, each review consists of x words and each of the words has a 300 dimensional vector. Each of the vectors are averaged to produce one 300 dimensional vector per review.
Then I pass this matrix through KNN. I get an accuracy of 72%.
As for other classifiers that I tested on the same dataset, all of them performed better on the TF-IDF method of vectorization. However, KNN performed better on word2vec.
Can anyone help me understand why there is a jump in accuracy for KNN in using the word2vec method as compared to when using the tfidf method?