Analyzing NIH Funding Patterns over Time with Statistical Text Analysis

In the past few years various government funding organizations such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S.\ National Science Foundation have provided access to large publicly-available online databases documenting the grants that they have funded over the past few decades. These databases provide an excellent opportunity for the application of statistical text analysis techniques to infer useful quantitative information about how funding patterns have changed over time. In this paper we analyze data from the National Cancer Institute (part of National Institutes of Health) and show how text classification techniques provide a useful starting point for analyzing how funding for cancer research has evolved over the past 20 years in the United States.