add measures of topic quality

[jwijffels]

note perplexity does not exist for BTM models, we can implement

• Coherence
• Average Intra-Cluster Distance
• Average Inter-Cluster Distance
• Purity
• Normalised mutual information
• Adjusted Rand Index

As defined in the BTM paper: https://github.com/xiaohuiyan/xiaohuiyan.github.io/blob/master/paper/BTM-WWW13.pdf

[jwijffels]

@manuelbickel I see you have been working on some of these measures for the text2vec package. Are you interested in some extra work for this biterm topic model package?

[manuelbickel]

Hi, thank you for your interest in my recent work. I will have to finalize some work for my PhD thesis in the next two months, but afterwards I could try to provide support. I think it should not be too difficult to use the metrics implemented in text2vec so far for the biterm model. The input required for coherence metrics are "just" the n top topic terms and a reference corpus to build a reference tcm from. To my knowledge (which is limited since I am not a computer scientist) coherence metrics have so far been applied in the context of "normal" text in contrast to the shorter texts BTM is aiming at - so we might have to check how good the metrics work in this context - but it should probably be fine if a suitable reference corpus of similar nature as the texts is selected, I guess.

[jwijffels]

That would be great!

[manuelbickel]

Just a reminder for the time when we get to work on this in detail... For the cluster distance metrics, the Jensen Shannon divergence is needed, which has already been implemented in LDAvis package here. We can use this...

[hg-wells]

Hi jwijffels,

Thank you very much for BTM. I am trying to find out the optimal number of topics from a corpus of tweets, my approach:
(1) Run a set of BTM models, from 1 up to 10 topics.
(2) Identify the model with higest overall log-likelihood as the baseline model (in my case, model 9, i.e. a 9-topic model)
(3) Run a series of likelihood ratio test for each model against model 9, with degrees of freedom 9-k (e.g., for a 3-topic model, 9-3 = 6 degrees of freedom)
(4) if significant, keep the baseline model as optimal

Could you please let me know what you think, I'd appreciate it much.
Also, I'm interested in coherence, I was wondering if there is any dev version for BTM or if you know any other way to compute it in R starting from a BTM-type object.

Thank you very much

[jwijffels]

No comment.
There exist up to now no public dev version containing measures of topic quality. Anyone interested in taking up the challenge and incorporating it in the package is appreciated.

[hg-wells]

Thanks. I wish I had the ability to comment and help, I would do it.

[manuelbickel]

First of all, sorry, that I still have not proceeded with coherence metrics for BTM - since my current main job has nothing to do with programming it's difficult to find time. Still on my list.

Now to the question of @hg-wells:
Generating many models with varying number of topics and finding the "best" makes sense from my perspective. I have published a paper using this approach based on the excellent text2vec package by dselivanov - so not BTM, but standard LDA, see paper and vignette here; the code is unpolished and package is not installation ready, do not hesitate to contact me for questions.

I used loglik and coherence metrics with a comparably small but thematically very specific reference corpus. The metrics all gave different answers regarding the "best" number of topics since they measure different qualities.

The best approach to my current knowledge would is creating models with different number of topics and also different hyerparameters, the use different reference corpora and different metrics to evaluate the results. Then pick out the "best" models that these metrics propose and inspect them manually by using expert knowledge. A lot of work, I know... I think pure automatic detection works in some contexts, but not in all. Texts represent meaning, it depends what kind of meaning you are searching for - there is no single correct answer. Imagine all these topic modelling algorithms as text coders like in the social sciences - you need to find out, which one you trust the most, this can vary depending on the task.

I hope that helps a bit, at least.

[hg-wells]

Hi, Thank you so much for your answer, I really appreciate it. I find your paper very interesting. As I said, I am interested in biterm models at the moment since I am working on tweets. But your code on LDA is of enormous help, thank you so much for sharing it. will look into that and try to work out coherence and apply it to BTM. I also appreciate the description of your approach. I will attempt to replicate the approach you have used in your paper. Again, thank you so much for all your help, I really appreciate it.

…

On Sun, 26 Apr 2020 at 14:59, Manuel Bickel ***@***.***> wrote: First of all, sorry, that I still have not proceeded with coherence metrics for BTM - since my current main job has nothing to do with programming it's difficult to find time. Still on my list. Now to the question of @hg-wells <https://github.com/hg-wells>: Generating many models with varying number of topics and finding the "best" makes sense from my perspective. I have published a paper using this approach based on the excellent text2vec package by dselivanov - so not BTM, but standard LDA, see paper and vignette here <https://github.com/manuelbickel/textility>; the code is unpolished and package is not installation ready, do not hesitate to contact me for questions. I used loglik and coherence metrics with a comparably small but thematically very specific reference corpus. The metrics all gave different answers regarding the "best" number of topics since they measure different qualities. The best approach to my current knowledge would is creating models with different number of topics and also different hyerparameters, the use different reference corpora and different metrics to evaluate the results. Then pick out the "best" models that these metrics propose and inspect them manually by using expert knowledge. A lot of work, I know... I think pure automatic detection works in some contexts, but not in all. Texts represent meaning, it depends what kind of meaning you are searching for - there is no single correct answer. Imagine all these topic modelling algorithms as text coders like in the social sciences - you need to find out, which one you trust the most, this can vary depending on the task. I hope that helps a bit, at least. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABH6WV4INYYJLLGLIXQDNT3ROQ44ZANCNFSM4GM2IKKA> .

[hg-wells]

Hi,
I tried to adapt the exclusivity function from the stm package to BTM (Roberts et al., 2014; see https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/stm/versions/1.3.5/topics/exclusivity) to measure topic coherence.
As I said, I am a beginner, apologies if in advance if this does not make any sense. I would really appreciate your feedback. Thank you.

`

Exclusivity

exclusivity <- function (model, M = 30, frexw = 0.7){
w <- frexw
phidf <- t(as.matrix(model$phi))
phi <- list(phidf)
row.names(phi) <- NULL
if (length(phi) != 1)
stop("Exclusivity calculation only designed for models without content covariates")
tbeta <- t(exp(phi[[1]]))
s <- rowSums(tbeta)
mat <- tbeta/s
ex <- apply(mat, 2, rank)/nrow(mat)
fr <- apply(tbeta, 2, rank)/nrow(mat)
frex <- 1/(w/ex + (1 - w)/fr)
index <- apply(tbeta, 2, order, decreasing = TRUE)[1:M, ]
out <- vector(length = ncol(tbeta))
for (i in 1:ncol(frex)) {
out[i] <- sum(frex[index[, i], i])
}
print(mean(out))
}

Run BTM and compute exclusivity

install.packages("BTM")
install.packages("udpipe")
library(BTM)
library(udpipe)
data("brussels_reviews_anno", package = "udpipe")
x <- subset(brussels_reviews_anno, language == "nl")
x <- subset(x, xpos %in% c("NN", "NNP", "NNS"))
x <- x[, c("doc_id", "lemma")]
model_x <- BTM(x, k = 5, iter = 10, trace = TRUE, background = TRUE)
exclusivity(model_x)
`

[jwijffels]

@hg-wells Thanks for the contribution and having taken the time for this
Before proceeding
Can you create a pull request where you put the R code in the package, document it, provide an example and show the expected behaviour of the function and possibly a test using the tinytest package
I've just set up travis CI such that we can see from there if there are any issues
thanks!

[hg-wells]

Hi, thank you for your reply and interest. I will surely do it, it may be in a few days but I am happy to move on with it!

…

On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 19:55, jwijffels ***@***.***> wrote: @hg-wells <https://github.com/hg-wells> Thanks for the contribution and having taken the time for this Before proceeding Can you create a pull request where you put the R code in the package, document it, provide an example and show the expected behaviour of the function and possibly a test using the tinytest package I've just set up travis CI such that we can see from there if there are any issues thanks! — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABH6WV6IYBVOMSPLAVQHIBLRTVOZVANCNFSM4GM2IKKA> .