ABSTRACT
HIGHLIGHTS The Latent Dirichlet Location (LDA) model is a popular method for creating mixed-membership clusters. Despite having been originally developed for text analysis, LDA has been used for a wide range of other applications. We propose a new formulation for the LDA model which incorporates covariates. In this model, a negative binomial regression is embedded within LDA, enabling straight-forward interpretation of the regression coefficients and the analysis of the quantity of cluster-specific elements in each sampling units (instead of the analysis being focused on modeling the proportion of each cluster, as in Structural Topic Models). We use slice sampling within a Gibbs sampling algorithm to estimate model parameters. We rely on simulations to show how our algorithm is able to successfully retrieve the true parameter values and the ability to make predictions for the abundance matrix using the information given by the covariates. The model is illustrated using real data sets from three different areas: text-mining of Coronavirus articles, analysis of grocery shopping baskets, and ecology of tree species on Barro Colorado Island (Panama). This model allows the identification of mixed-membership clusters in discrete data and provides inference on the relationship between covariates and the abundance of these clusters.We propose a new formulation for the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model which incorporates covariates.Our extension enables a straight-forward interpretation of the regression coefficients and the analysis of the quantity of cluster-specific elements in each sampling unit - including the prediction of these quantities in a new sample through covariates.We illustrate the benefits of this formulation using three data sets: text-mining of Coronavirus articles, analysis of grocery shopping baskets, and ecology of tree species in Barro Colorado Island.We provide an R package that enables users to readily apply our model. [ FROM AUTHOR]