Modeling topical trends over continuous time with priors

In this paper, we propose a new method for topical trend analysis. We model topical trends by per-topic Beta distributions as in Topics over Time (TOT), proposed as an extension of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). However, TOT is likely to overfit to timestamp data in extracting latent topics. Therefore, we apply prior distributions to Beta distributions in TOT. Since Beta distribution has no conjugate prior, we devise a trick, where we set one among the two parameters of each per-topic Beta distribution to one based on a Bernoulli trial and apply Gamma distribution as a conjugate prior. Consequently, we can marginalize out the parameters of Beta distributions and thus treat timestamp data in a Bayesian fashion. In the evaluation experiment, we compare our method with LDA and TOT in link detection task on TDT4 dataset. We use word predictive probabilities as term weights and estimate document similarities by using those weights in a TFIDF-like scheme. The results show that our method achieves a moderate fitting to timestamp data.Advances in Neural Networks - ISNN 2010 : 7th International Symposium on Neural Networks, ISNN 2010, Shanghai, China, June 6-9, 2010, Proceedings, Part IIThe original publication is available at www.springerlink.co

Inferring Dynamic User Interests in Streams of Short Texts for User Clustering

User clustering has been studied from different angles. In order to identify shared interests, behavior-based methods consider similar browsing or search patterns of users, whereas content-based methods use information from the contents of the documents visited by the users. So far, content-based user clustering has mostly focused on static sets of relatively long documents. Given the dynamic nature of social media, there is a need to dynamically cluster users in the context of streams of short texts. User clustering in this setting is more challenging than in the case of long documents, as it is difficult to capture the users’ dynamic topic distributions in sparse data settings. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic user clustering topic model (UCT). UCT adaptively tracks changes of each user’s time-varying topic distributions based both on the short texts the user posts during a given time period and on previously estimated distributions. To infer changes, we propose a Gibbs sampling algorithm where a set of word pairs from each user is constructed for sampling. UCT can be used in two ways: (1) as a short-term dependency model that infers a user’s current topic distribution based on the user’s topic distributions during the previous time period only, and (2) as a long-term dependency model that infers a user’s current topic distributions based on the user’s topic distributions during multiple time periods in the past. The clustering results are explainable and human-understandable, in contrast to many other clustering algorithms. For evaluation purposes, we work with a dataset consisting of users and tweets from each user. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed short-term and long-term dependency user clustering models compared to state-of-the-art baselines

Understanding Vehicular Traffic Behavior from Video: A Survey of Unsupervised Approaches

Recent emerging trends for automatic behavior analysis and understanding from infrastructure video are reviewed. Research has shifted from high-resolution estimation of vehicle state and instead, pushed machine learning approaches to extract meaningful patterns in aggregates in an unsupervised fashion. These patterns represent priors on observable motion, which can be utilized to describe a scene, answer behavior questions such as where is a vehicle going, how many vehicles are performing the same action, and to detect an abnormal event. The review focuses on two main methods for scene description, trajectory clustering and topic modeling. Example applications that utilize the behavioral modeling techniques are also presented. In addition, the most popular public datasets for behavioral analysis are presented. Discussion and comment on future directions in the field are also provide