def evaluate(self, train_data, test_data=None, metric='perplexity'):
        """
        Estimate the model's ability to predict new data. Imagine you have a
        corpus of books. One common approach to evaluating topic models is to
        train on the first half of all of the books and see how well the model
        predicts the second half of each book.

        This method returns a metric called perplexity, which  is related to the
        likelihood of observing these words under the given model. See
        :py:func:`~turicreate.topic_model.perplexity` for more details.

        The provided `train_data` and `test_data` must have the same length,
        i.e., both data sets must have the same number of documents; the model
        will use train_data to estimate which topic the document belongs to, and
        this is used to estimate the model's performance at predicting the
        unseen words in the test data.

        See :py:func:`~turicreate.topic_model.TopicModel.predict` for details
        on how these predictions are made, and see
        :py:func:`~turicreate.text_analytics.random_split` for a helper function
        that can be used for making train/test splits.

        Parameters
        ----------
        train_data : SArray or SFrame
            A set of documents to predict topics for.

        test_data : SArray or SFrame, optional
            A set of documents to evaluate performance on.
            By default this will set to be the same as train_data.

        metric : str
            The chosen metric to use for evaluating the topic model.
            Currently only 'perplexity' is supported.

        Returns
        -------
        out : dict
            The set of estimated evaluation metrics.

        See Also
        --------
        predict, turicreate.toolkits.text_analytics.random_split

        Examples
        --------
        >>> docs = turicreate.SArray('https://static.turi.com/datasets/nips-text')
        >>> train_data, test_data = turicreate.text_analytics.random_split(docs)
        >>> m = turicreate.topic_model.create(train_data)
        >>> m.evaluate(train_data, test_data)
        {'perplexity': 2467.530370396021}

        """
        train_data = _check_input(train_data)

        if test_data is None:
            test_data = train_data
        else:
            test_data = _check_input(test_data)

        predictions = self.predict(train_data, output_type='probability')
        topics = self.topics

        ret = {}
        ret['perplexity'] = perplexity(test_data,
                                       predictions,
                                       topics['topic_probabilities'],
                                       topics['vocabulary'])
        return ret
Estimate the model's ability to predict new data. Imagine you have a
        corpus of books. One common approach to evaluating topic models is to
        train on the first half of all of the books and see how well the model
        predicts the second half of each book.

        This method returns a metric called perplexity, which  is related to the
        likelihood of observing these words under the given model. See
        :py:func:`~turicreate.topic_model.perplexity` for more details.

        The provided `train_data` and `test_data` must have the same length,
        i.e., both data sets must have the same number of documents; the model
        will use train_data to estimate which topic the document belongs to, and
        this is used to estimate the model's performance at predicting the
        unseen words in the test data.

        See :py:func:`~turicreate.topic_model.TopicModel.predict` for details
        on how these predictions are made, and see
        :py:func:`~turicreate.text_analytics.random_split` for a helper function
        that can be used for making train/test splits.

        Parameters
        ----------
        train_data : SArray or SFrame
            A set of documents to predict topics for.

        test_data : SArray or SFrame, optional
            A set of documents to evaluate performance on.
            By default this will set to be the same as train_data.

        metric : str
            The chosen metric to use for evaluating the topic model.
            Currently only 'perplexity' is supported.

        Returns
        -------
        out : dict
            The set of estimated evaluation metrics.

        See Also
        --------
        predict, turicreate.toolkits.text_analytics.random_split

        Examples
        --------
        >>> docs = turicreate.SArray('https://static.turi.com/datasets/nips-text')
        >>> train_data, test_data = turicreate.text_analytics.random_split(docs)
        >>> m = turicreate.topic_model.create(train_data)
        >>> m.evaluate(train_data, test_data)
        {'perplexity': 2467.530370396021}