Discovery of activity composites using topic models: An analysis of unsupervised methods

In this work we investigate unsupervised activity discovery approaches using three topic model (TM) approaches, based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), n-gram TM (NTM), and correlated TM (CTM). While LDA structures activity primitives, NTM adds primitive sequence information, and CTM exploits co-occurring topics. We use an activity composite/primitive abstraction and analyze three public datasets with different properties that affect the discovery, including primitive rate, activity composite specificity, primitive sequence similarity, and composite-instance ratio. We compare the activity composite discovery performance among the TM approaches and against a baseline using k-means clustering. We provide guidelines for method and optimal TM parameter selection, depending on data properties and activity primitive noise. Results indicate that TMs can outperform k-means clustering up to 17%, when composite specificity is low. LDA-based TMs showed higher robustness against noise compared to other TMs and k-means. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.