Ensemble Methods for Improving Classification of Data Produced by Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Abstract

Topic models are very popular methods of text analysis. The most popular algorithm for topic modelling is LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation). Recently, many new methods were proposed, that enable the usage of this model in large scale processing. One of the problem is, that a data scientist has to choose the number of topics manually. This step, requires some previous analysis. A few methods were proposed to automatize this step, but none of them works very well if LDA is used as a preprocessing for further classification. In this paper, we propose an ensemble approach which allows us to use more than one model at prediction phase, at the same time, reducing the need of finding a single best number of topics. We have also analyzed a few methods of estimating topic number.