Making sense of topic models
Topic models can produce clusters of words that characterize written documents. But how do we figure out what those clusters mean, exactly?
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Publications
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An intro to topic models for text analysis
Topic models can scan documents, examine words and phrases within them, and “learn” groups of words that characterize those documents.
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Middle children have become rarer, but a growing share of Americans now say three or more kids are ‘ideal’
Roughly four-in-ten U.S. adults think families of three or more children are ideal. Yet it’s still much more common for American women at the end of their childbearing years to have had one or two kids than three or more.
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For Most Trump Voters, ‘Very Warm’ Feelings for Him Endured
In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, an overwhelming majority of those who said they had voted for him had “warm” feelings for him.
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Record number of forcibly displaced people lived in sub-Saharan Africa in 2017
The number of people living in sub-Saharan Africa who were forced to leave their homes due to conflict reached a new high of 18.4 million in 2017, up sharply from 14.1 million in 2016 – the largest regional increase of forcibly displaced people in the world.
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Why America’s ‘nones’ don’t identify with a religion
Six-in-ten religious “nones” in the U.S. say the questioning of religious teachings is a very important reason for their lack of affiliation. The second-most-common reason is opposition to the positions taken by churches on social and political issues.
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For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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Most European students are learning a foreign language in school while Americans lag
A median of 92% of European students are learning a language in school. Far fewer K-12 students in the U.S. participate in foreign language education.
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What are nonprobability surveys?
Many online surveys are conducted using “nonprobability” or “opt-in” samples, which are generally easier and cheaper to conduct. In our latest Methods 101 video, we explore some of the features of nonprobability surveys and how they differ from traditional probability-based polls.
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Methods 101: What are nonprobability surveys?
Our latest Methods 101 video explores some of the ways these surveys differ from traditional probability-based polls.
