Does the Word Cloud in SAS VA use the LDA (latent dirichlet allocation) model?

[mattneo]

Does the Word Cloud in SAS VA use the LDA (latent dirichlet allocation) model to come up with topics? Trying to interpret the various results derived from word cloud, and how best to use it.

[Sam_SAS]

Which version of VA are you using? The later versions have separate objects for the basic word cloud and for text analytics "Text Topics".

[mattneo]

Hi there. I use sas va 7.3 now. But will be moving over to sas va viya 8.3
soon. How best to perform text analytics in both versions?

[Sam_SAS · Accepted solution]

In 8.3, the Text Topics object offers analytical capabilities for text:

https://go.documentation.sas.com/?cdcId=vacdc&cdcVersion=8.3&docsetId=vaobj&docsetTarget=p061hi0pikj...

In 7.3, analytics is part of the Word Cloud visualization in the Explorer interface:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/vaug/68648/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n1oo7kmcwcn1rsn1ll0bo...

SAS also offers some dedicated products for text analysis, SAS Text Miner and Visual Text Analytics.

I'm not sure if I can share the exact algorithms that we use to analyze the topics in your data.

Sam

[mattneo]

Hi Sam, thanks for the links. Just curious. How come text analytics in word cloud is only available in Explorer mode and not in Design Report mode (only word count is available) ? Intending to create a dashboard report with text analytics for mgt reporting, so viz in Explorer mode may not be ideal.

[Sam_SAS]

The Explorer and Designer used to be separate projects and the visualizations/objects had different code. I'm not sure why this was, but we unified everything for VA 8.1 and later (and VA 7.5).

You might be able to export a Text Analytics word cloud from the Explorer to the Designer. I don't remember if that is one of the visualizations that you can export into the Designer.

When you upgrade to VA 8.3, things will be simpler. (Although, it would be preferable to upgrade to 8.4 or 8.5 instead to get the latest features and some important performance improvements.)

Good luck with your report, and please feel free to follow up with any additional questions.

Sam