How have Data Science Skill Sets Evolved? A case study using embeddings

Abstract

Many data scientists are familiar with word embedding models such as word2vec, which capture semantic similarity among words and phrases in a corpus. However, word embeddings are limited in their ability to interrogate a corpus alongside other context or over time. Moreover, word embedding models either need significant amounts of data, or tuning through transfer learning of a domain-specific vocabulary that is unique to most commercial applications. In this talk, I will introduce exponential family embeddings. Developed by Rudolph and Blei, these methods extend the idea of word embeddings to other types of high-dimensional data. I will demonstrate how they can be used to conduct advanced topic modeling on datasets that are medium-sized, which are specialized enough to require significant modifications of a word2vec model and contain more general data types.