Unveiling topic dependencies through a multilevel topic model: a hierarchical approach to enhanced interpretability

Youngsun Kim, Hwan Chung and Saebom Jeon

Journal of Applied Statistics, 2026, vol. 53, issue 5, 894-913

Abstract: Topic modeling is a process that discovers key themes in unstructured text data by identifying the distribution of topics and words in a document, revealing hidden dimensions. Latent Dirichlet allocation is a widely used generative probabilistic topic model, but it cannot capture the dependency between topics. Generally, the topics within a document are primarily influenced by its overarching theme which naturally interrelates the topics. Thus, it is imperative to unveil such relationships between the topics. To this end, this study proposes a multilevel topic model (MTM) to unearth the hidden topic dependency in a corpus through multilevel latent structure. The MTM allows word-based topic proportions to vary across the higher-level latent structure. The parameters are estimated with a modified EM algorithm using an upward-downward approach to alleviate the computational complexity. Empirical studies on corpora have also been conducted on the multilevel topic model and the hierarchy of multilevel topic model have been interpreted. These analyses have demonstrated that the proposed multilevel topic model outperforms latent Dirichlet allocation in terms of systematic interpretability.

Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.1080/02664763.2025.2540380

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