Context Topic modeling finds human-readable structures in unstructured textual data. A widely used topic modeling technique is Latent Dirichlet allocation. When running on different datasets, LDA suffers from “order effects”, i.e., different topics are generated if the order of training data is shuffled. Such order effects introduce a systematic error for any study. This error can relate to misleading results; specifically, inaccurate topic descriptions and a reduction in the efficacy of text mining classification results.

Objective To provide a method in which distributions generated by LDA are more stable and can be used for further analysis.

Method We use LDADE, a search-based software engineering tool which uses Differential Evolution (DE) to tune the LDA’s parameters. LDADE is evaluated on data from a programmer information exchange site (Stackoverflow), title and abstract text of thousands of Software Engineering (SE) papers, and software defect reports from NASA. Results were collected across different implementations of LDA (Python+Scikit-Learn, Scala+Spark) across Linux platform and for different kinds of LDAs (VEM, Gibbs sampling). Results were scored via topic stability and text mining classification accuracy.

Results In all treatments: (i) standard LDA exhibits very large topic instability; (ii) LDADE’s tunings dramatically reduce cluster instability; (iii) LDADE also leads to improved performances for supervised as well as unsupervised learning.

Conclusion Due to topic instability, using standard LDA with its “off-the-shelf” settings should now be depreciated. Also, in future, we should require SE papers that use LDA to test and (if needed) mitigate LDA topic instability. Finally, LDADE is a candidate technology for effectively and efficiently reducing that instability.