Research on Method of Technological Evolution Analysis Based on HLDA

This paper analyzes technological evolution from viewpoint of change in technology system. As knowledge base, which used to describe technology system conventionally, suffers from heavy dependency on domain experts, this paper replaces knowledge base with hierarchical topic model to analyze the evolution process of technology system. Specifically, we find frequent closed itemsets from terminologies in patent documents at first, then discover association rules and use them to measure the importance of terminologies and semantic relationship between terminologies, afterwards we clean terminologies in corpus and run HLDA model to describe technology system, finally, we analyze technological evolution via changes of technology system. An empirical research on Hard disk drive demonstrates the feasibility of this method.