An Experimental Study of Incremental SVD on Latent Semantic Analysis

Abstract

Singular value decomposition is an important method to factorize a matrix, which is useful for many applications, such as principal component analysis in statistics and latent semantic analysis in natural language text processing. In order to diminish the computational complexity, incremental update algorithm is developed, especially for analyzing relationships between text documents. However, it is at the cost of a reduction in precision. In this paper, we study the effect of incremental update on latent semantic analysis; and, by experiments, to investigate the trend downward of computing precision and then try to find the balance point between re-computation and incremental update. The results indicate that when increased documents are less than original documents, incremental update method has an approximate precision to re-computing method, and then its recall ratio will obviously decline. It could be helpful for deciding when the matrix factorization must be recomputed.