User–Topic Modeling for Online Community Analysis

Abstract

Analyzing user behavior in online spaces is an important task. This paper is dedicated to analyzing the online community in terms of topics. We present a user–topic model based on the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), as an application of topic modeling in a domain other than textual data. This model substitutes the concept of word occurrence in the original LDA method with user participation. The proposed method deals with many problems regarding topic modeling and user analysis, which include: inclusion of dynamic topics, visualization of user interaction networks, and event detection. We collected datasets from four online communities with different characteristics, and conducted experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by revealing interesting findings covering numerous aspects.