A Bayesian approach to modeling topic-metadata relationships

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Schulze, P., Wiegrebe, S., Thurner, P. W., Heumann, C., Aßenmacher, M.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2021
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author Schulze, P.
Wiegrebe, S.
Thurner, P. W.
Heumann, C.
Aßenmacher, M.
author_facet Schulze, P.
Wiegrebe, S.
Thurner, P. W.
Heumann, C.
Aßenmacher, M.
contents The objective of advanced topic modeling is not only to explore latent topical structures, but also to estimate relationships between the discovered topics and theoretically relevant metadata. Methods used to estimate such relationships must take into account that the topical structure is not directly observed, but instead being estimated itself in an unsupervised fashion, usually by common topic models. A frequently used procedure to achieve this is the method of composition, a Monte Carlo sampling technique performing multiple repeated linear regressions of sampled topic proportions on metadata covariates. In this paper, we propose two modifications of this approach: First, we substantially refine the existing implementation of the method of composition from the R package stm by replacing linear regression with the more appropriate Beta regression. Second, we provide a fundamental enhancement of the entire estimation framework by substituting the current blending of frequentist and Bayesian methods with a fully Bayesian approach. This allows for a more appropriate quantification of uncertainty. We illustrate our improved methodology by investigating relationships between Twitter posts by German parliamentarians and different metadata covariates related to their electoral districts, using the Structural Topic Model to estimate topic proportions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2104_02496
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Bayesian approach to modeling topic-metadata relationships
Schulze, P.
Wiegrebe, S.
Thurner, P. W.
Heumann, C.
Aßenmacher, M.
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The objective of advanced topic modeling is not only to explore latent topical structures, but also to estimate relationships between the discovered topics and theoretically relevant metadata. Methods used to estimate such relationships must take into account that the topical structure is not directly observed, but instead being estimated itself in an unsupervised fashion, usually by common topic models. A frequently used procedure to achieve this is the method of composition, a Monte Carlo sampling technique performing multiple repeated linear regressions of sampled topic proportions on metadata covariates. In this paper, we propose two modifications of this approach: First, we substantially refine the existing implementation of the method of composition from the R package stm by replacing linear regression with the more appropriate Beta regression. Second, we provide a fundamental enhancement of the entire estimation framework by substituting the current blending of frequentist and Bayesian methods with a fully Bayesian approach. This allows for a more appropriate quantification of uncertainty. We illustrate our improved methodology by investigating relationships between Twitter posts by German parliamentarians and different metadata covariates related to their electoral districts, using the Structural Topic Model to estimate topic proportions.
title A Bayesian approach to modeling topic-metadata relationships
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02496