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Sparse Topical Coding

We present sparse topical coding (STC), a non-probabilistic formulation of topic models for discovering latent representations of large collections of data. Unlike probabilistic topic models, STC relaxes the normalization constraint of admixture proportions and the constraint of defining a normalized likelihood function. Such relaxations make STC amenable to: 1) directly control the sparsity of inferred representations by using sparsity-inducing regularizers; 2) be seamlessly integrated with a convex error function (e.g., SVM hinge loss) for supervised learning; and 3) be efficiently learned with a simply structured coordinate descent algorithm. Our results demonstrate the advantages of STC and supervised MedSTC on identifying topical meanings of words and improving classification accuracy and time efficiency.