Nonparametric Relational Topic Models through Dependent Gamma Processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonparametric relational topic model that uses dependent gamma processes to discover hidden topics and their number in document networks without prior specification, effectively capturing network structure.

Contribution

It proposes a novel nonparametric model employing dependent gamma processes with a Markov Random Field constraint to infer the number of topics and their sharing across documents.

Findings

Successfully learns the number of topics from data.

Effectively models network structure with subsampling strategy.

Performs well on synthetic and real-world datasets.

Abstract

Traditional Relational Topic Models provide a way to discover the hidden topics from a document network. Many theoretical and practical tasks, such as dimensional reduction, document clustering, link prediction, benefit from this revealed knowledge. However, existing relational topic models are based on an assumption that the number of hidden topics is known in advance, and this is impractical in many real-world applications. Therefore, in order to relax this assumption, we propose a nonparametric relational topic model in this paper. Instead of using fixed-dimensional probability distributions in its generative model, we use stochastic processes. Specifically, a gamma process is assigned to each document, which represents the topic interest of this document. Although this method provides an elegant solution, it brings additional challenges when mathematically modeling the inherent network structure of typical document network, i.e., two spatially closer documents tend to have more similar topics. Furthermore, we require that the topics are shared by all the documents. In order to resolve these challenges, we use a subsampling strategy to assign each document a different gamma process from the global gamma process, and the subsampling probabilities of documents are assigned with a Markov Random Field constraint that inherits the document network structure. Through the designed posterior inference algorithm, we can discover the hidden topics and its number simultaneously. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world network datasets demonstrate the capabilities of learning the hidden topics and, more importantly, the number of topics.