Situation Awareness In Telecommunication Networks Using Topic Modeling

For an operator of wireless telecommunication networks to make timely interventions in the network before minor faults escalate into issues that can lead to substandard system performance, good situation awareness is of high importance. Due to the increasing complexity of such networks, as well as the explosion of traffic load, it has become necessary to aid human operators to reach a good level of situation awareness through the use of exploratory data analysis and information fusion techniques. However, to understand the results of such techniques is often cognitively challenging and time consuming. In this paper, we present how telecommunication operators can be aided in their data analysis and sense-making processes through the usage and visualization of topic modeling results. We present how topic modeling can be used to extract knowledge from base station counter readings and make design suggestions for how to visualize the analysis results to a telecommunication operator.