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A0514
Title: Multiscale analysis of count data through topic alignment Authors:  Julia Fukuyama - Indiana University (United States) [presenting]
Laura Symul - Stanford University (United States)
Kris Sankaran - University of Wisconsin (United States)
Abstract: Topic modeling is a popular method used to describe biological count data. With topic models, the user must specify the number of topics $K$. Since there is no definitive way to choose $K$ and since a true value might not exist, we develop techniques to study the relationships across models with different $K$. This can show how many topics are consistently present across different models, if a topic is only transiently present, or if a topic splits in two when $K$ increases. This strategy gives more insight into the process of generating the data than choosing a single value of $K$ would. We design a visual representation of these cross-model relationships, which we call a topic alignment, and present three diagnostics based on it. We show the effectiveness of these tools for interpreting the topics on simulated and real data, and we release an accompanying R package, alto.