Analyzing the Influence of Current Situation in the Country for Vegetable Prices using LDA Topic Modeling

Abstract

The price fluctuation of vegetables is one of the economic problems faced by every country, including Sri Lanka. Many factors such as environmental conditions as well as supply, demand, social, cultural, and political situations of the country cause the price of vegetables to fluctuate. Nowadays, social media represents public opinion about current events. Twitter has become one of the fastest social media platforms for getting the latest and historical news and it can be used to track historical trends in different fields. In this paper, we applied the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling algorithm to determine the topics of the tweets about Sri Lanka when the prices of vegetables were very high and low. Through a manual analysis of extracted topics, we identified the situation in the country during a selected period and how it has impacted the vegetable prices. According to the results, vegetable prices are on the rise during the festive season in Sri Lanka. It also appears that political factors, such as elections, do not have a major impact on vegetable prices. It seems that vegetable prices have gone up during the unstable or chaotic periods in Sri Lanka.