Topic Models For Feature Selection in Document Clustering

We investigate the idea of using a topic model such as the popular Latent Dirichlet Allocation model as a feature selection step for unsupervised document clustering, where documents are clustered using the proportion of the various topics that are present in each document. One concern with using “vanilla” LDA as a feature selection method for input to a clustering algorithm is that the Dirichlet prior on the topic mixing proportions is too smooth and well-behaved. It does not encourage a “bumpy” distribution of topic mixing proportion vectors, which is what one would desire as input to a clustering algorithm. As such, we propose two variant topic models that are designed to do a better job of producing topic mixing proportions that have a good clustering structure.