contefranz / optop

Optimal topic identification from a pool of Latent Dirichlet Allocation models

Hi, I am Francesco! 👋

I am an Assistant Professor of Accounting Analytics and Data Science at the Department of Accounting at Bocconi University.

I am also a fellow at the Bocconi Institute for Data Science and Analyics.

I try to understand what companies (and managers) write in their reports using Natural Language Processing techniques.

optop's Issues

Check compilation issues under MacOS

Using devtools::load_all(".") raises the following error:

##> Error: Could not find tools necessary to compile a package
##> Call `pkgbuild::check_build_tools(debug = TRUE)` to diagnose the problem.

I solved by invoking options(buildtools.check = function(action) TRUE ) before loading the functions or building the package from scratch.

To do: check if this is a one time issue or if this is consistent at each start up.

R session used:

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
#> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
#> Running under: macOS Catalina 10.15.7
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRblas.dylib
#> LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
#> 
#> locale:
#> [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] digest_0.6.27     assertthat_0.2.1  magrittr_2.0.1    reprex_1.0.0     
#>  [5] evaluate_0.14     highr_0.8         stringi_1.5.3     rlang_0.4.10     
#>  [9] cli_2.3.1         rstudioapi_0.13   fs_1.5.0          rmarkdown_2.7    
#> [13] tools_4.0.4       stringr_1.4.0     glue_1.4.2        xfun_0.22        
#> [17] yaml_2.2.1        compiler_4.0.4    htmltools_0.5.1.1 knitr_1.31

^{Created on 2021-03-27 by the reprex package (v1.0.0)}

UPDATE

It appears to be a bug in RStudio, but folks there do not seem to be investing a lot of effort. This is a good issue to monitor here.

A temporary workaround which seems to be working, for me at least, most of the times is to do devtools::load_all(".") first to initiate all the compilation and function loadings. After that, standard RStudio shortcuts for building and checking seem to work.

Update initial checks for agg_*_stability()

Update the argument optimal_model for both agg_document_stability() and agg_topic_stability().

Remove comments referring to old code

After all the conversions are done and tested, remove all the comments referring to old chunks of code which are no more applicable to the status quo. This is an issue that involves most of the functions.

Move topic_match() to internal

The function topic_match() is a utility function that returns a list with two data.table containing the informative and uninformative components. These are use by the agg_document_stability() function only.

I have a couple of suggestions:

1. Move topic_match() to the utility function section and do not export it to the user. The designated functions will call it internally. This is to avoid confusion since there is really nothing else to do once the informative and uninformative components are computed.
2. Convert topic_match() to C++. Even if this is "just" a utility function, its cost can't be neglected.

R CMD check for CRAN submission

Different machines present different WARNINGS and NOTES after running R CMD check --as-cran.

@mattia- Can you check if you have missing packages that could conflict with the check?
This is the R session I am using for you to compare.

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
#> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
#> Running under: macOS Catalina 10.15.7
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRblas.dylib
#> LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.0/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
#> 
#> locale:
#> [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] digest_0.6.27     assertthat_0.2.1  magrittr_2.0.1    reprex_1.0.0     
#>  [5] evaluate_0.14     highr_0.8         stringi_1.5.3     rlang_0.4.10     
#>  [9] cli_2.3.1         rstudioapi_0.13   fs_1.5.0          rmarkdown_2.7    
#> [13] tools_4.0.4       stringr_1.4.0     glue_1.4.2        xfun_0.22        
#> [17] yaml_2.2.1        compiler_4.0.4    htmltools_0.5.1.1 knitr_1.31

^{Created on 2021-03-27 by the reprex package (v1.0.0)}

Final C++ conversions

Port topic_stability(), agg_topic_stability() and agg_document_stability() inner computations to C++

Improve optimal_topic() C++ efficiency

Even though optimal_topic() has been converted to a C++ function, it still presents issues.
Find what they are and make the code more efficient.

Loop over remaining documents in optimal_topic() goes out of bound

When optimal_topics() finds no perfect match between weighted_dfm and lda_models because the LDA was not able to estimate the model over those documents, the function removes the entries from weighted_dfm. We thought we were updating the same object but apparently we are not doing that. For this reason, when optimal_topic_core() loops over the documents in a given element of lda_models, it goes out of bound.

Could it be that we do not carry the information of the removed documents from R to C++?
This needs to be solved because it prevents the release of v1.0.0. I am labeling this as a bug then.

Integrate patchwork in agg_topic_stability() and agg_document_stability()

This is pretty much self-explanatory. The plotting system invokes marrangeGrob() which is really bad.
Replace it with a more appropriate patchwork way.