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The technology of creating patterns from natural language words (concepts) based on text data in the bag of words model is considered. Patterns are used to reduce the dimension of the original space in the description of documents and search for semantically related words by topic. The process of dimensionality reduction is implemented through the formation of patterns of latent features. The variety of structures of document relations is investigated in order to divide them into themes in the latent space.

It is considered that a given set of documents (objects) is divided into two non-overlapping classes, for the analysis of which it is necessary to use a common dictionary. The belonging of words to a common vocabulary is initially unknown. Class objects are considered as opposition to each other. Quantitative parameters of oppositionality are determined through the values of the stability of each feature and generalized assessments of objects according to non-overlapping sets of features.

To calculate the stability, the feature values are divided into non-intersecting intervals, the optimal boundaries of which are determined by a special criterion. The maximum stability is achieved under the condition that the boundaries of each interval contain values of one of the two classes.

The composition of features in sets (patterns of words) is formed from a sequence ordered by stability values. The process of formation of patterns and latent features based on them is implemented according to the rules of hierarchical agglomerative grouping.

A set of latent features is used for cluster analysis of documents using metric grouping algorithms. The analysis applies the coefficient of content authenticity based on the data on the belonging of documents to classes. The coefficient is a numerical characteristic of the dominance of class representatives in groups.

To divide documents into topics, it is proposed to use the union of groups in relation to their centers. As patterns for each topic, a sequence of words ordered by frequency of occurrence from a common dictionary is considered.

The results of a computational experiment on collections of abstracts of scientific dissertations are presented. Sequences of words from the general dictionary on 4 topics are formed.

The paper considers a method for studying panel data based on the use of agglomerative hierarchical clustering — grouping objects based on the similarities and differences in their features into a hierarchy of clusters nested into each other. We used 2 alternative methods for calculating Euclidean distances between objects — the distance between the values averaged over observation interval, and the distance using data for all considered years. Three alternative methods for calculating the distances between clusters were compared. In the first case, the distance between the nearest elements from two clusters is considered to be distance between these clusters, in the second — the average over pairs of elements, in the third — the distance between the most distant elements. The efficiency of using two clustering quality indices, the Dunn and Silhouette index, was studied to select the optimal number of clusters and evaluate the statistical significance of the obtained solutions. The method of assessing statistical reliability of cluster structure consisted in comparing the quality of clustering on a real sample with the quality of clustering on artificially generated samples of panel data with the same number of objects, features and lengths of time series. Generation was made from a fixed probability distribution. At the same time, simulation methods imitating Gaussian white noise and random walk were used. Calculations with the Silhouette index showed that a random walk is characterized not only by spurious regression, but also by “spurious clustering”. Clustering was considered reliable for a given number of selected clusters if the index value on the real sample turned out to be greater than the value of the 95% quantile for artificial data. A set of time series of indicators characterizing production in the regions of the Russian Federation was used as a sample of real data. For these data only Silhouette shows reliable clustering at the level p < 0.05. Calculations also showed that index values for real data are generally closer to values for random walks than for white noise, but it have significant differences from both. Since three-dimensional feature space is used, the quality of clustering was also evaluated visually. Visually, one can distinguish clusters of points located close to each other, also distinguished as clusters by the applied hierarchical clustering algorithm.