Assessing citizen science opportunities in forest monitoring using probabilistic topic modelling

Background： With mounting global environmental, social and economic pressures the resilience and stability of forests and thus the provisioning of vital ecosystem services is increasingly threatened. Intensified monitoring can help to detect ecological threats and changes earlier, but monitoring resources are limited. Participatory forest monitoring with the help of ＂citizen scientists＂ can provide additional resources for forest monitoring and at the same time help to communicate with stakeholders and the general public. Examples for citizen science projects in the forestry domain can be found but a solid, applicable larger framework to utilise public participation in the area of forest monitoring seems to be lacking. We propose that a better understanding of shared and related topics in citizen science and forest monitoring might be a first step towards such a framework. Methods： We conduct a systematic meta-analysis of 1015 publication abstracts addressing ＂forest monitoring＂ and ＂citizen science＂ in order to explore the combined topical landscape of these subjects. We employ ＇topic modelling an unsupervised probabilistic machine learning method, to identify latent shared topics in the analysed publications. Results： We find that large shared topics exist, but that these are primarily topics that would be expected in scientific publications in general. Common domain-specific topics are under-represented and indicate a topical separation of the two document sets on ＂forest monitoring＂ and ＂citizen science＂ and thus the represented domains. While topic modelling as a method proves to be a scalable and useful analytical tool, we propose that our approach could deliver even more useful data if a larger document set and full-text publications would be available for analysis. Conclusions： We propose that these results, together with the observation of non-shared but related topics, point at under-utilised opportunities for public participation in forest monitoring. Citizen science could be applied as a versatile tool in forest ecosystems monitoring, complementing traditional forest monitoring programmes, assisting early threat recognition and helping to connect forest management with the general public. We conclude that our presented approach should be pursued further as it may aid the understanding and setup of citizen science efforts in the forest monitoring domain.

Topic evolution based on the probabilistic topic model： a review

Accurately representing the quantity and characteristics of users＇ interest in certain topics is an important problem facing topic evolution researchers, particularly as it applies to modem online environments. Search engines can provide information retrieval for a specified topic from archived data, but fail to reflect changes in interest toward the topic over time in a structured way. This paper reviews notable research on topic evolution based on the probabilistic topic model from multiple aspects over the past decade. First, we introduce notations, terminology, and the basic topic model explored in the survey, then we summarize three categories of topic evolution based on the probabilistic topic model： the discrete time topic evolution model, the continuous time topic evolution model, and the online topic evolution model. Next, we describe applications of the topic evolution model and attempt to summarize model generalization performance evaluation and topic evolution evaluation methods, as well as providing comparative experimental results for different models. To conclude the review, we pose some open questions and discuss possible future research directions.

Scientific articles recommendation with topic regression and relational matrix factorization

In this paper we study the problem of recommending scientific articles to users in an online community with a new perspective of considering topic regression modeling and articles relational structure analysis simultaneously. First, we present a novel topic regression model, the topic regression matrix factorization （tr-MF）, to solve the problem. The main idea of tr-MF lies in extending the matrix factorization with a probabilistic topic modeling. In particular, tr-MF introduces a regression model to regularize user factors through probabilistic topic modeling under the basic hypothesis that users share similar preferences if they rate similar sets of items. Consequently, tr-MF provides interpretable latent factors for users and items, and makes accurate predictions for community users. To incorporate the relational structure into the framework of tr-MF, we introduce relational matrix factorization. Through combining tr-MF with the relational matrix femtorization, we propose the topic regression collective matrix factorization （tr-CMF） model. In addition, we also present the collaborative topic regression model with relational matrix factorization （CTR-RMF） model, which combines the existing collaborative topic regression （CTR） model and relational matrix factorization （RMF）. From this point of view, CTR-RMF can be considered as an appropriate baseline for tr-CMF. Further, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed models on a large subset of the data from CiteULike, a bibliography sharing service dataset. The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art matrix factorization models with a significant margin. Specifically, the proposed models are effective in making predictions for users with only few ratings or even no ratings, and support tasks that are specific to a certain field, neither of which has been addressed in the existing literature.