What is topic modeling and when do you use LDA?
mediumAnswer
- Topic modeling discovers latent themes in a document corpus.
- LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) models each document as a mixture of topics and each topic as a distribution over words.
- Use it for exploratory analysis of text collections without labels.
- Modern alternatives: embedding-based topic modeling (BERTopic) — usually more coherent on short/noisy text.
Check yourself — multiple choice
- LDA needs supervised topic labels
- LDA models documents as mixtures of topics and topics as word distributions
- LDA is only used for regression
- BERTopic is an older method than LDA
LDA is a probabilistic mixture model for topics/words.
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