Effect of Preprocessing and No of Topics on Automated Topic Classification Performance

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet has caused an increasing generation of data. A high amount of the data is of textual form, which is highly unstructured. Almost every field i.e, business, engineering, medicine, and science can benefit from the textual data when knowledge is extracted. The knowledge extraction requires the extraction and recording of metadata on the unstructured text documents that constitute the textual data. This phenomenon is regarded as topic modeling. The resulting topics can ease searching, statistical characterization, and classification. Some well-known algorithms for topic modeling include Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF), and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA). Different parameters can affect the performance of topic modeling. An interesting parameter could be the time required to perform topic modeling. The fact that time is affected by many factors applicable to topic modeling as well; however, measuring the time concerning some constraints can be beneficial to provide insight. In this paper, we alter some preprocessing steps and topics to study their impact on the time taken by the LDA and NMF topic models. In preprocessing, we limit our study by altering only the sampling and feature subset selection whereas in the second step we have changed the number of topics. The results show a significant improvement in time.