Recently, gensim, a Python package for topic modeling, released a new version of its package which includes the implementation of author-topic models.

The most famous topic model is undoubtedly latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), as proposed by David Blei and his colleagues. Such a topic model is a generative model, described by the following directed graphical models:

In the graph, $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are hyperparameters. $\theta$ is the topic distribution of a document, $z$ is the topic for each word in each document, $\phi$ is the word distributions for each topic, and $w$ is the generated word for a place in a document.

There are models similar to LDA, such as correlated topic models (CTM), where $\phi$ is generated by not only $\beta$ but also a covariance matrix $\Sigma$.

There exists an author model, which is a simpler topic model. The difference is that the words in the document are generated from the author for each document, as in the following graphical model. $x$ is the author of a given word in the document.

Combining these two, it gives the author-topic model as a hybrid, as shown below:

The new release of Python package, gensim, supported the author-topic model, as demonstrated in this Jupyter Notebook.

P.S.:

• I am also aware that there is another topic model called structural topic model (STM), developed for the field of social science. However, there is no Python package supporting this, but an R package, called stm, is available for it. You can refer to their homepage too.
• I may consider including author-topic model and STM in the next release of the Python package shorttext.

Because of work, I developed two R packages to host the functions that I used a lot. It did bring me a lot of convenience, such as that I don’t have to start my data analysis in a particular folder and switch later on.

To do that, you need to use RStudio. Then you have to install devtools package by calling in the R console:

install.packages('devtools')


and load it by simply call:

library(devtools)


And then you have to install the roxygen2 package by calling:

install_github("klutometis/roxygen")
library(roxygen2)


There are a lot of good tutorials about writing an R package. I especially like this Youtube video clip about building an R package with RStudio and roxygen2:

And Hilary Parker’s blog entry is useful as well.

On the other hand, if you are publishing your R package onto your Github repository, it would be nice to include a README file introducing your work. You need to know the Markdown language to write the file named README.md, and put it onto the root folder of your repository. My friend, Qianli Deng, showed me this Lei Feng’s blog entry, which I found extremely useful. Markdown is remarkably simpler than LaTeX.