Exploring Anti-Aging Literature via ConvexTopics and Large Language Models

The rapid expansion of biomedical publications creates challenges for organizing knowledge and detecting emerging trends, underscoring the need for scalable and interpretable methods. Common clustering and topic modeling approaches such as K-means or LDA remain sensitive to initialization and prone to local optima, limiting reproducibility and evaluation. We propose a reformulation of a convex optimization based clustering algorithm that produces stable, fine-grained topics by selecting exemplars from the data and guaranteeing a global optimum. Applied to about 12,000 PubMed articles on aging and longevity, our method uncovers topics validated by medical experts. It yields interpretable topics spanning from molecular mechanisms to dietary supplements, physical activity, and gut microbiota. The method performs favorably, and most importantly, its reproducibility and interpretability distinguish it from common clustering approaches, including K-means, LDA, and BERTopic. This work provides a basis for developing scalable, web-accessible tools for knowledge discovery.

PDC -- a probabilistic distributional clustering algorithm: a case study on suicide articles in PubMed

The need to organize a large collection in a manner that facilitates human comprehension is crucial given the ever-increasing volumes of information. In this work, we present PDC (probabilistic distributional clustering), a novel algorithm that, given a document collection, computes disjoint term sets representing topics in the collection. The algorithm relies on probabilities of word co-occurrences to partition the set of terms appearing in the collection of documents into disjoint groups of related terms. In this work, we also present an environment to visualize the computed topics in the term space and retrieve the most related PubMed articles for each group of terms. We illustrate the algorithm by applying it to PubMed documents on the topic of suicide. Suicide is a major public health problem identified as the tenth leading cause of death in the US. In this application, our goal is to provide a global view of the mental health literature pertaining to the subject of suicide, and through this, to help create a rich environment of multifaceted data to guide health care researchers in their endeavor to better understand the breadth, depth and scope of the problem. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed algorithm by providing a web portal that allows mental health researchers to peruse the suicide-related literature in PubMed.