A Latent Space Model for Weighted Keyword Co-Occurrence Networks with Applications in Knowledge Discovery in Statistics

Keywords are widely recognized as pivotal in conveying the central idea of academic articles. In this article, we construct a weighted and dynamic keyword co-occurrence network and propose a latent space model for analyzing it. Our model has two special characteristics. First, it is applicable to weighted networks; however, most previous models were primarily designed for unweighted networks. Simply replacing the frequency of keyword co-occurrence with binary values would result in a significant loss of information. Second, our model can handle the situation where network nodes evolve over time, and assess the effect of new nodes on network connectivity. We use the projected gradient descent algorithm to estimate the latent positions and establish the theoretical properties of the estimators. In the real data application, we study the keyword co-occurrence network within the field of statistics. We identify popular keywords over the whole period as well as within each time period. For keyword pairs, our model provides a new way to assess the association between them. Finally, we observe that the interest of statisticians in emerging research areas has gradually grown in recent years. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.