Guaranteed Model Order Estimation and Sample Complexity Bounds for LDA

The question of how to determine the number of independent latent factors (topics) in mixture models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is of great practical importance. In most applications, the exact number of topics is unknown, and depends on the application and the size of the data set. Bayesian nonparametric methods can avoid the problem of topic number selection, but they can be impracticably slow for large sample sizes and are subject to local optima. We develop a guaranteed procedure for topic number recovery that does not necessitate learning the model's latent parameters beforehand. Our procedure relies on adapting results from random matrix theory. Performance of our topic number recovery procedure is superior to hLDA, a nonparametric method. We also discuss some implications of our results on the sample complexity and accuracy of popular spectral learning algorithms for LDA. Our results and procedure can be extended to spectral learning algorithms for other exchangeable mixture models as well as Hidden Markov Models.