Topic Modeling for Sequences of Temporal Activities

Temporally-ordered activity sequences are popular in many real-world domains. This paper presents an LDA-style topic model for sequences of temporal activities that captures three features of such sequences: 1) the counts of unique activities, 2) the Markov transition dependence and 3) the absolute or relative timestamp on each activity. In modeling the first two features we propose the concept of global transition probability and distinguish it with local transition probability used in previous work. In modeling the third feature, we employ a continuous time distribution to depict the time range of latent topics. The combination of the global transition probability and the temporal information helps to refine the mixture distribution over topics for temporal sequence analysis. We present results on the data of system call traces, showing better next activity prediction and sequence clustering.