Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: A Variational EM Method for Mixed Membership Models with Multivariate
  Rank Data: an Analysis of Public Policy Preferences   In this article, we consider modeling ranked responses from a heterogeneous
population. Specifically, we analyze data from the Eurobarometer 34.1 survey
regarding public policy preferences towards drugs, alcohol and AIDS. Such
policy preferences are likely to exhibit substantial differences within as well
as across European nations reflecting a wide variety of cultures, political
affiliations, ideological perspectives and common practices. We use a mixed
membership model to account for multiple subgroups with differing preferences
and to allow each individual to possess partial membership in more than one
subgroup. Previous methods for fitting mixed membership models to rank data in
a univariate setting have utilized an MCMC approach and do not estimate the
relative frequency of each subgroup. We propose a variational EM approach for
fitting mixed membership models with multivariate rank data. Our method allows
for fast approximate inference and explicitly estimates the subgroup sizes.
Analyzing the Eurobarometer 34.1 data, we find interpretable subgroups which
generally agree with the "left vs right" classification of political
ideologies.

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The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
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The categories of this paper are: math
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
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The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
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The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
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The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
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The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
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The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
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The categories of this paper are: math-ph
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
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The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
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The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
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The categories of this paper are: eess
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The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
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The categories of this paper are: cs