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Archive for the ‘Self-Organizing Map’ tag

Blog Author Clustering with SOMs

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For the final project in Neural Networks (CIS 6050 W11), I decided to cluster blog posts based on the difference between an author’s word choice and the word choice of the entire group of authors.

>>> Attached Course Paper: Kohonen Self-Organizing Maps in Clustering of Blog Authors (pdf) <<<

A self-organizing map (Kohonen SOM) strategy was used. The words chosen to compose a given blog post defined wherein the map it should be placed. The purpose of this project was to figure out what predictive power could be harnessed given the combination of the SOM and each author’s lexicon; i.e. whether or not it is possible to automatically categorize an author’s latest post without the use of any tools besides the above.

Data: Thirteen authors contributing a total of fourteen blogs participated in the study (all data was retrieved on 2011 March 8th). The below table summarizes the origin of the data.

Author Posts Lexicon Blog Name Subject Matter
Andre Masella 198 7953 MasellaSphere Synth Bio, Cooking, Engineering
Andrew Berry 46 2630 Andrew Berry Development Drupal, Web Dev, Gadgets
Arianne Villa 41 1217 …mrfmr. Internet Culture, Life
Cara Ma 12 854 Cara’s Awesome Blog Life, Pets, Health
Daniela Mihalciuc 211 4454 Citisen of the World Travel, Life, Photographs
Eddie Ma 161 5960 Ed’s Big Plans Computing, Academic, Science
Jason Ernst 61 3445 Jason’s Computer Science Blog Computing, Academic
John Heil 4 712 Dos Margaritas Por Favor Science, Music, Photography
Lauren Stein 91 4784 The Most Interesting Person Improv, Happiness, Events
Lauren Stein (Cooking) 7 593 The Laurentina Cookbook Cooking, Humour
Liv Monck-Whipp 30 398 omniology Academic, Biology, Science
Matthew Gingerich 98 395 The Majugi Blog Academic, Synth Bio, Engineering
Richard Schwarting 238 7538 Kosmokaryote Academic, Computing, Linux
Tony Thompson 51 2346 Tony Thompson, Geek for Hire Circuitry, Electronic Craft, Academic

Daniela remarks that the spelling of Citisen is intentional.

In order to place the blog posts into a SOM, each post was converted to a bitvector. Each bit is assigned to a specific word, so that the positions of each bit consistently represents the same word from post to post. An on-bit represented the presence of a word while an off-bit represented the absence of a word. Frequently used words like “the” were omitted from the word bit-vector, and seldom used words were also omitted.

Results: The center image (in the collection to the left) is a density map where darker pixels indicates a larger number of posts — this centre map represents all of the posts made by all of the authors pooled together.

Because of the number of posts and the number of authors, I’ve exploded the single SOM image into the remaining fourteen images.

It was found that posts were most often clustered together if they were both by the same author and on the same topic. Clusters containing more than one author generally did not show much agreement about the topic.

Regions of this SOM were dominated by particular authors and topics as below.

Region Authors Topics
Top Left Liv Academic Journals
Eddie Software Projects
Jason Academic
Top Border Lauren Human Idiosyncrasies
Richard Linux
Top Right Lauren Improv
Up & Left of Centre Daniela Travel
Centre all short and misfit posts
Right Border Andre Cooking
Just Below Centre Matthew Software Projects
Bottom Left Andre Language Theory
Andrew Software Projects
Jason Software Projects
Bottom Border Richard Academic
Bottom Right Eddie Web Development
Jason Software Tutorials

Discussion: There are some numerical results to go along with this, but they aren’t terribly exciting — the long and the short of it is that this project should to be repeated. The present work points towards the following two needed improvements.

First, the way the bitvectors were cropped at the beginning and at the end were based on a usage heuristic that doesn’t really conform to information theory. I’d likely take a look at the positional density of all bits to select meaningful words to cluster.

Second, all posts were included — this results in the dense spot in the middle of the central map. Whether these posts are short or just misfit, many of them can probably be removed by analyzing their bit density too.

Appendix: Here are two figures that describe the distribution of the data in the word bitvectors.

When we sort the words based from a high number of occurrences down to a low number of occurrences, we get graphs that look like the above two. A rank class contains all words that have the same number of occurrences across the entire study. The impulse graph on the left shows the trend for the number of unique words in each rank class. The number of words drastically increases as the classes contain fewer words. The impulse graph on the right shows the trend for the count of uses for words in a given rank class. The number of uses decreases as words become more rare.

These graphs were made before the main body of the work to sketch out how I wanted the bitvectors to behave — they verify that there was nothing unusual about the way the words were distributed amongst the data.

Eddie Ma

June 29th, 2011 at 2:10 pm

SOM in Regression Data (animation)

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The below animation is what happens when you train a Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) using data meant for regression instead of clustering or classification. A total of 417300 training cycles are performed — a single training cycle is the presentation of one exemplar to the SOM. The SOM has dimensions 65×65. Exemplars are chosen at random and 242 snapshots are taken in total (once every 1738 training cycles).

(animation in full post here …)

Eddie Ma

March 17th, 2011 at 7:52 pm