Probabilistic Topic Models of Text and Users

In this talk, David Blei will review the basics of topic modeling and describe his recent research on collaborative topic models—models that simultaneously analyze documents and the corresponding reader behavior. Blei will explain how using collaborative topic models to discover patterns in how people read can help point readers to relevant new documents. Finally, he will discuss the broader field of probabilistic modeling, which gives data scientists both a rich language for expressing statistical assumptions and scalable algorithms for using those assumptions to uncover hidden patterns in massive data.