Development GuideΒΆ

Topik has been designed to be extensible at each of the five steps of topic modeling:

  • data import
  • tokenization / transformation
  • vectorization
  • topic modeling
  • visualization

Each of these steps are designed using function registries to guide extension development and to make creation of pluggable user interfaces feasible. The general layout of topik is the following:

  • a folder (python package) for each step
    • __init__.py : exposes public API methods for the package.
    • _registry.py : implementation and instantiation of the function registry for each package. There is generally only one, but can be more than one registry per package. This file also contains the register decorator, used to register functions with the registry. This decorator runs when the file using it is imported.
    • ???_output.py : class implementation (possibly base class) of output from this package’s step. This is not strictly necessary. When a step returns only an iterator of data, there is no additional output class created to wrap it.
    • any function implementations for the given step.
    • a tests folder, containing unit tests for the given step. These should not depend on output from other steps. Hard-code data as necessary.

External code can hook into the dictionary of registered methods using the appropriate register decorator function, which should be made available in each package’s __init__.py. This decorator will execute when the foreign code is first run, so make sure that you import your module before requesting the dictionary of registered classes for a given step.

For general command line or IPython notebook usage, it is probably easier to directly import functions from the folder structure, rather than depending on the function registry. The registered dictionary approach makes dynamic UI creation easier, but it hinders autocompletion. An intermediate approach would be to assign the results of dictionary access to a variable before instantiating the class. For example,

>>> # one-shot, but autocompletion of function arguments doesn't work
>>> model = registered_models["LDA"](tokenized_corpora, 5)
>>> model_class = registered_models["LDA"]
>>> # Autocompletion of class arguments should work here
>>> model = model_class(tokenized_corpora, 5)
>>> # import model implementation directly:
>>> from topik.models import lda
>>> # Autocompletion of class arguments should work here
>>> model = lda(vectorized_corpus, 5)