Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

6001

Date

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Mathematical Sciences

Concentration

Statistics

Committee Chair

Dale Bowman

Committee Member

Saunak Sen

Committee Member

Su Chen

Abstract

Topic modeling is a technique for reducing dimensionality of large corpuses of text. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), the most prevalent form of topic modeling, improved upon earlier methods by introducing Bayesian iterative updates, providing a sound theoretical basis for modeling by iteration. Yet a piece of the modeling puzzle remains unsolved; the number of topics to model, K, is an as yet unanswered question. This number of topics may also be called the dimensionality of the model. With this is an integrally related puzzle; how to determine when a model has been best fit. Presented here are a brief history of the development of topic modeling from its inception preceding LDA to the present; and a comparison of methods for determining what is a best-fit topic model, in pursuit of the most appropriate K.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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