Graduation Year

2016

Date of Submission

12-2016

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Mathematics

Reader 1

Blake Hunter

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2016 Yicong Lin

Abstract

Intellectual property has gained more attention in recent decades because innovations have become one of the most important resources. This paper implements a probabilistic topic model using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to discover some of the key elements in computer patent, as the industry grew from 1990 to 2009. This paper proposes a new “shrinking model” based on NMF and also performs a close examination of some variations of the base model. Note that rather than studying the strategy to pick the optimized number of topics (“rank”), this paper is particularly interested in which factorization (including different kinds of initiation) methods are able to construct “topics” with the best quality given the predetermined rank. Performing NMF to the description text of patent features, we observe key topics emerge such as “platform” and “display” with strong presence across all years but we also see other short-lived significant topics such as “power” and “heat” which signify the saturation of the industry.

Download

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

Share

COinS