Useful ToPIC: Self-tuning strategies to enhance Latent Dirichlet Allocation

ToPIC (Tuning of Parameters for Inference of Concepts) is a distributed self-tuning engine whose aim is to cluster collections of textual data into correlated groups of documents through a topic modeling methodology (i.e., LDA). ToPIC includes automatic strategies to relieve the end-user of the burden of selecting proper values for the overall analytics process. ToPIC's current implementation runs on Apache Spark, a state-of-the-art distributed computing framework. As a case study, ToPIC has been validated on three real collections of textual documents characterized by different distributions. The experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution in analyzing collections of documents without tuning algorithm parameters and in discovering cohesive and well-separated groups of documents with a similar topic.