Graduation Year
2016
Date of Submission
4-2016
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Mathematical Sciences
Reader 1
Blake Hunter
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2016 Chong Shen
Abstract
The ongoing European Refugee Crisis has been one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter for the past 8 months. This paper applies topic modeling on bulks of tweets to discover the hidden patterns within these social media discussions. In particular, we perform topic analysis through solving Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) as an Inexact Alternating Least Squares problem. We accelerate the computation using techniques including tweet sampling and augmented NMF, compare NMF results with different ranks and visualize the outputs through topic representation and frequency plots. We observe that supportive sentiments maintained a strong presence while negative sentiments such as safety concerns have emerged over time.
Recommended Citation
Shen, Chong, "Topic Analysis of Tweets on the European Refugee Crisis Using Non-negative Matrix Factorization" (2016). CMC Senior Theses. 1388.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1388
Included in
Numerical Analysis and Computation Commons, Other Applied Mathematics Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Social Media Commons, Social Statistics Commons
