Quantitative Economics

Journal Of The Econometric Society

Edited by: Stéphane Bonhomme • Print ISSN: 1759-7323 • Online ISSN: 1759-7331

Quantitative Economics: Nov, 2024, Volume 15, Issue 4

Robust Machine Learning Algorithms for Text Analysis

https://doi.org/10.3982/QE1825
p. 939-970

Shikun Ke|José Luis Montiel Olea|James Nesbit

We study the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, a popular Bayesian algorithm for text analysis. We show that the model's parameters are not identified, which suggests that the choice of prior matters. We characterize the range of values that the posterior mean of a given functional of the model's parameters can attain in response to a change in the prior, and we suggest two algorithms that report this range. Both of our algorithms rely on obtaining multiple Nonnegative Matrix Factorizations of either the posterior draws of the corpus' population term‐document frequency matrix or of its maximum likelihood estimator. The key idea is to maximize/minimize the functional of interest over all these nonnegative matrix factorizations. To illustrate the applicability of our results, we revisit recent work studying the effects of increased transparency on the communication structure of monetary policy discussions in the United States.


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Supplement to "Robust Machine Learning Algorithms for Text Analysis"

Shikun Ke, José Luis Montiel Olea, and James Nesbit

The replication package for this paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10856384. The Journal checked the data and codes included in the package for their ability to reproduce the results in the paper and approved online appendices.

Supplement to "Robust Machine Learning Algorithms for Text Analysis"

Shikun Ke, José Luis Montiel Olea, and James Nesbit

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