Variational Expectation-Maximization Algorithm in Posterior Distribution of a Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model for Research Topic Analysis

In this paper, we propose a variational expectation-maximization algorithm that computes posterior probabilities from Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. The algorithm approximates the intractable posterior distribution of a document term matrix generated from a corpus made up by 50 papers. It approximates the posterior by searching the local optima using lower bound of the true posterior distribution. Moreover, it maximizes the lower bound of the log-likelihood of the true posterior by minimizing the relative entropy of the prior and the posterior distribution known as KL-Divergence. The experimental results indicate that documents clustered to image classification and segmentation are correlated at 0.79 while those clustered to object detection and image segmentation are highly correlated at 0.96. The proposed variational inference algorithm performs efficiently and faster than Gibbs sampling at a computational time of 0.029s.