Installation

topica ships as a compiled wheel. No Rust toolchain or JVM required.

pip install topica

or, with uv:

uv pip install topica

The only runtime dependency is NumPy. A few features light up if you also have optional packages installed:

Optional package	Enables
pyLDAvis	Interactive intertopic-distance charts via prepare_pyldavis
matplotlib	The plot=True figure from quality_frontier
pandas	Convenient tabular handling of effect tables and diagnostics

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• A platform with a prebuilt wheel (Linux, macOS, Windows on x86-64 / arm64).

Building from source

If you want to build from the repository (e.g. to hack on the Rust core) you'll need a Rust toolchain and maturin:

git clone https://github.com/nealcaren/topica
cd topica
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install maturin numpy pytest
maturin develop --release --features python
pytest