Topic model kernel : an empirical study towards probabilistically reduced features for classification

Probabilistic topic models have become a standard in modern machine learning with wide applications in organizing and summarizing ‘documents’ in high-dimensional data such as images, videos, texts, gene expression data, and so on. Representing data by dimensional reduction of mixture proportion extracted from topic models is not only richer in semantics than bag-of-word interpretation, but also more informative for classification tasks. This paper describes the Topic Model Kernel (TMK), a high dimensional mapping for Support Vector Machine classification of data generated from probabilistic topic models. The applicability of our proposed kernel is demonstrated in several classification tasks from real world datasets. We outperform existing kernels on the distributional features and give the comparative results on non-probabilistic data types.

An ontology-driven topic mapping approach to multi-level management of e-learning resources

An appropriate use of various pedagogical strategies is fundamental for the effective transfer of knowledge in a flourishing e-learning environment. The resultant information superfluity, however, needs to be tackled for developing sustainable e-learning. This necessitates an effective representation and intelligent access to learning resources. Topic maps address these problems of representation and retrieval of information in a distributed environment. The former aspect is particularly relevant where the subject domain is complex and the later aspect is important where the amount of resources is abundant but not easily accessible. Conversely, effective presentation of learning resources based on various pedagogical strategies along with global capturing and authentication of learning resources are an intrinsic part of effective management of learning resources. Towards fulfilling this objective, this paper proposes a multi-level ontology-driven topic mapping approach to facilitate an effective visualization, classification and global authoring of learning resources in e-learning.

Effect of mood, social connectivity and age in online depression community via topic and linguistic analysis

Depression afflicts one in four people during their lives. Several studies have shown that for the isolated and mentally ill, the Web and social media provide effective platforms for supports and treatments as well as to acquire scientific, clinical understanding of this mental condition. More and more individuals affected by depression join online communities to seek for information, express themselves, share their concerns and look for supports [12]. For the first time, we collect and study a large online depression community of more than 12,000 active members from Live Journal. We examine the effect of mood, social connectivity and age on the online messages authored by members in an online depression community. The posts are considered in two aspects: what is written (topic) and how it is written (language style). We use statistical and machine learning methods to discriminate the posts made by bloggers in low versus high valence mood, in different age categories and in different degrees of social connectivity. Using statistical tests, language styles are found to be significantly different between low and high valence cohorts, whilst topics are significantly different between people whose different degrees of social connectivity. High performance is achieved for low versus high valence post classification using writing style as features. The finding suggests the potential of using social media in depression screening, especially in online setting.

Affective, linguistic and topic patterns in online autism communities

Online communities offer a platform to support and discuss health issues. They provide a more accessible way to bring people of the same concerns or interests. This paper aims to study the characteristics of online autism communities (called Clinical) in comparison with other online communities (called Control) using data from 110 Live Journal weblog communities. Using machine learning techniques, we comprehensively analyze these online autism communities. We study three key aspects expressed in the blog posts made by members of the communities: sentiment, topics and language style. Sentiment analysis shows that the sentiment of the clinical group has lower valence, indicative of poorer moods than people in control. Topics and language styles are shown to be good predictors of autism posts. The result shows the potential of social media in medical studies for a broad range of purposes such as screening, monitoring and subsequently providing supports for online communities of individuals with special needs.

Deferentially private tagging recommendation based on topic model

Tagging recommender system allows Internet users to annotate resources with personalized tags and provides users the freedom to obtain recommendations. However, It is usually confronted with serious privacy concerns, because adversaries may re-identify a user and her/his sensitive tags with only a little background information. This paper proposes a privacy preserving tagging release algorithm, PriTop, which is designed to protect users under the notion of differential privacy. The proposed PriTop algorithm includes three privacy preserving operations: Private Topic Model Generation structures the uncontrolled tags, Private Weight Perturbation adds Laplace noise into the weights to hide the numbers of tags; while Private Tag Selection finally finds the most suitable replacement tags for the original tags. We present extensive experimental results on four real world datasets and results suggest the proposed PriTop algorithm can successfully retain the utility of the datasets while preserving privacy. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.

Regularizing topic discovery in emrs with side information by using hierarchical bayesian models

We propose a novel hierarchical Bayesian framework, word-distance-dependent Chinese restaurant franchise (wd-dCRF) for topic discovery from a document corpus regularized by side information in the form of word-to-word relations, with an application on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). Typically, a EMRs dataset consists of several patients (documents) and each patient contains many diagnosis codes (words). We exploit the side information available in the form of a semantic tree structure among the diagnosis codes for semantically-coherent disease topic discovery. We introduce novel functions to compute word-to-word distances when side information is available in the form of tree structures. We derive an efficient inference method for the wddCRF using MCMC technique. We evaluate on a real world medical dataset consisting of about 1000 patients with PolyVascular disease. Compared with the popular topic analysis tool, hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP), our model discovers topics which are superior in terms of both qualitative and quantitative measures.

Speed up health research through topic modeling of coded clinical data

Although random control trial is the gold standard in medical research, researchers are increasingly looking to alternative data sources for hypothesis generation and early-stage evidence collection. Coded clinical data are collected routinely in most hospitals. While they contain rich information directly related to the real clinical setting, they are both noisy and semantically diverse, making them difficult to analyze with conventional statistical tools. This paper presents a novel application of Bayesian nonparametric modeling to uncover latent information in coded clinical data. For a patient cohort, a Bayesian nonparametric model is used to reveal the common comorbidity groups shared by the patients and the proportion that each comorbidity group is reflected individual patient. To demonstrate the method, we present a case study based on hospitalization coding from an Australian hospital. The model recovered 15 comorbidity groups among 1012 patients hospitalized during a month. When patients from two areas of unequal socio-economic status were compared, it reveals higher prevalence of diverticular disease in the region of lower socio-economic status. The study builds a convincing case for routine coded data to speed up hypothesis generation.

Privacy-preserving topic model for tagging recommender systems

Tagging recommender systems provide users the freedom to explore tags and obtain recommendations. The releasing and sharing of these tagging datasets will accelerate both commercial and research work on recommender systems. However, releasing the original tagging datasets is usually confronted with serious privacy concerns, because adversaries may re-identify a user and her/his sensitive information from tagging datasets with only a little background information. Recently, several privacy techniques have been proposed to address the problem, but most of these lack a strict privacy notion, and rarely prevent individuals being re-identified from the dataset. This paper proposes a privacy- preserving tag release algorithm, PriTop. This algorithm is designed to satisfy differential privacy, a strict privacy notion with the goal of protecting users in a tagging dataset. The proposed PriTop algorithm includes three privacy-preserving operations: Private topic model generation structures the uncontrolled tags; private weight perturbation adds Laplace noise into the weights to hide the numbers of tags; while private tag selection finally finds the most suitable replacement tags for the original tags, so the exact tags can be hidden. We present extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets, Delicious, MovieLens, Last.fm and BibSonomy. While the recommendation algorithm is successful in all the cases, our results further suggest the proposed PriTop algorithm can successfully retain the utility of the datasets while preserving privacy.

Overcoming data scarcity of Twitter: using tweets as bootstrap with application to autism-related topic content analysis

Notwithstanding recent work which has demonstrated the potential of using Twitter messages for content-specific data mining and analysis, the depth of such analysis is inherently limited by the scarcity of data imposed by the 140 character tweet limit. In this paper we describe a novel approach for targeted knowledge exploration which uses tweet content analysis as a preliminary step. This step is used to bootstrap more sophisticated data collection from directly related but much richer content sources. In particular we demonstrate that valuable information can be collected by following URLs included in tweets. We automatically extract content from the corresponding web pages and treating each web page as a document linked to the original tweet show how a temporal topic model based on a hierarchical Dirichlet process can be used to track the evolution of a complex topic structure of a Twitter community. Using autism-related tweets we demonstrate that our method is capable of capturing a much more meaningful picture of information exchange than user-chosen hashtags.

Topic model kernel classification with probabilistically reduced features

Probabilistic topic models have become a standard in modern machine learning to deal with a wide range of applications. Representing data by dimensional reduction of mixture proportion extracted from topic models is not only richer in semantics interpretation, but could also be informative for classification tasks. In this paper, we describe the Topic Model Kernel (TMK), a topicbased kernel for Support Vector Machine classification on data being processed by probabilistic topic models. The applicability of our proposed kernel is demonstrated in several classification tasks with real world datasets. TMK outperforms existing kernels on the distributional features and give comparative results on nonprobabilistic data types.

Morphomettic changes on honeybee Apis mellifera L. workers fat body cells after juvenile hormone topic application at emergence

The effect of topical application of juvenile hormone (JH) over the lifetime of worker bees was evaluated in Apis mellifera, by measuring the area of the two cell types, trophocytes and oenocytes, found in the fat body. Topical application of 1 mu l of a 1 mu g/mu l solution of JH in acetone to the abdomens of newly emerged workers produced an increase in cell size, in both types of cell of 5-day-old treated workers in relation to the untreated control. The treatment was more effective on the oenocytes, since there were significant differences compared to the averages of the treatments and the interaction of the treatments with the age of the workers. The developmental pattern seemed to differ from the treated group. However, subsequent effects were probably dependent on different, natural variations in hormonal levels. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.