Posts tagged data mining

Finding structure in xkcd comics with Latent Dirichlet Allocation

xkcd, data mining, topic modeling, LDA, machine learning

xkcd is self-proclaimed as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. There was a recent effort to quantify whether or not these “topics” agree with topics derived from the xkcd text corpus using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). That analysis makes the all too common folly of choosing an arbitrary number of topics. Maybe xkcd’s tagline does provide a strong prior belief of a small number of topics, but here we take a more objective approach and let the data choose the number of topics. An “optimal” number of topics is found using the Bayesian model selection approach (with uniform prior belief on the number of topics) suggested by Griffiths and Steyvers (2004). After an optimal number is decided, topic interpretations and trends over time are explored.

http://cpsievert.github.io/projects/615/xkcd/