Topic Models Conditioned on Arbitrary Features with Dirichlet-multinomial Regression

Although fully generative models have been successfully used to model the contents of text documents, they are often awkward to apply to combinations of text data and document metadata. In this paper we propose a Dirichlet-multinomial regression (DMR) topic model that includes a log-linear prior on document-topic distributions that is a function of observed features of the document, such as author, publication venue, references, and dates. We show that by selecting appropriate features, DMR topic models can meet or exceed the performance of several previously published topic models designed for specific data.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2008

GroupUs: Smartphone Proximity Data and Human Interaction Type Mining

There is an increasing interest in analyzing social interaction from mobile sensor data, and smartphones are rapidly becoming the most attractive sensing option. We propose a new probabilistic relational model to analyze long-term dynamic social networks created by physical proximity of people. Our model can infer different interaction types from the network, revealing the participants of a given group interaction, and discovering a variety of social contexts. Our analysis is conducted on Bluetooth data sensed with smartphones for over one year on the life of 40 individuals related by professional or personal links. We objectively validate our model by studying its predictive performance, showing a significant advantage over a recently proposed model

Contextual grouping: discovering real-life interaction types from longitudinal Bluetooth data

By exploiting built-in sensors, mobile smartphone have become attractive options for large-scale sensing of human behavior as well as social interaction. In this paper, we present a new probabilistic model to analyze longitudinal dynamic social networks created by the physical proximity of people sensed continuously by the phone Bluetooth sensors. A new probabilistic model is proposed in order to jointly infer emergent grouping modes of the community together with their temporal context. We present experimental results on a Bluetooth proximity network sensed with mobile smart-phones over 9 months of continuous real-life, and show the effectiveness of our method

Human Interaction Discovery in Smartphone Proximity Networks

Since humans are fundamentally social beings and interact frequently with others in their daily life, understanding social context is of primary importance in building context-aware applications. In this paper, using smartphone Bluetooth as a proximity sensor to create social networks, we present a probabilistic approach to mine human interaction types in real life. Our analysis is conducted on Bluetooth data continuously sensed with smartphones for over one year from 40 individuals who are professionally or personally related. The results show that the model can automatically discover a variety of social contexts. We objectively validated our model by studying its predictive and retrieval performance

Group and Topic Discovery from Relations and Their Attributes

We present a probabilistic generative model of entity relationships and their attributes that simultaneously discovers groups among the entities and topics among the corresponding textual attributes. Block-models of relationship data have been studied in social network analysis for some time. Here we simultaneously cluster in several modalities at once, incorporating the attributes (here, words) associated with certain relationships. Significantly, joint inference allows the discovery of topics to be guided by the emerging groups, and vice-versa. We present experimental results on two large data sets: sixteen years of bills put before the U.S. Senate, comprising their corresponding text and voting records, and thirteen years of similar data from the United Nations. We show that in comparison with traditional, separate latent-variable models for words, or Blockstructures for votes, the Group-Topic model\u27s joint inference discovers more cohesive groups and improved topics