A Probabilistic Model for Clustering Text Documents with Multiple Fields

We address the problem of clustering documents with multiple fields, such as scientific literature with the distinct fields: title, abstract, keywords, main text and references. By taking into consideration of the distinct word distributions of each field, we propose a new probabilistic model, Field Independent Clustering Model (FICM), for clustering documents with multiple fields. The benefits of FICM come not only from integrating the discrimination abilities of each field but also from the power of selecting the most suitable component probabilistic model for each field. We examined the performance of FICM on the problem of clustering biomedical documents with three fields (title, abstract and MeSH). From the genomics track data of TREC 2004 and TREC 2005, we randomly generated 60 datasets where the number of classes in each dataset ranged from 3 to 12. By applying the appropriate configuration of generative models for each field, FICM outperformed a classical multinomial model in 59 out of the total 60 datasets, of which 47 were statistically significant at the 95% level, and FICM also outperformed a multivariate Bernoulli model in 52 out of the total 60 datasets, of which 36 were statistically significant at the 95% level.