Analysing the history of autism spectrum disorder using topic models

Abstract

We describe a novel framework for the discovery of underlying topics of a longitudinal collection of scholarly data,and the tracking of their lifetime and popularity over time. Unlike the social media or news data, as the topic nuances in science result in new scientific directions to emerge, a new approach to model the longitudinal literature data is using topics which remain identifiable over the course of time. Current studies either disregard the time dimension or treat it as an exchangeable covariate when they fix the topics over time or do not share the topics over epochs when they model the time naturally. We address these issues by adopting a non-parametric Bayesian approach. We assume the data is partially exchangeable and divided it into consecutive epochs. Then, by fixing the topics in a recurrent Chinese restaurant franchise, we impose a static topical structure on the corpus such that the they are shared across epochs and the documents within epochs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on a collection of medical literature related to autism spectrum disorder. We collect a large corpus of publications and carefully examining two important research issues of the domain as case studies. Moreover, we make the results of our experiment and the source code of the model, freely available to aid other researchers by analysing the results or applying the model to their data collections.