Installation

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

pip install topica

or, with uv:

uv pip install topica

The runtime dependencies are NumPy and pandas (the DataFrame workflow, from_dataframe, and the bundled datasets all build on pandas). Everything else is an optional extra, so the core stays light. Install the ones you need:

Install	Enables
pip install "topica[viz]"	matplotlib figures: plot_report, quality_frontier(plot=True), the search-K and discovery plots
pip install "topica[formula]"	The R-style formula interface (design_matrix, estimate_effect(formula=...)); pulls in formulaic and pandas
pip install "topica[polars]"	Pass Polars DataFrames/Series to from_dataframe, align, and design_matrix
pip install "topica[llm]"	LLM topic labels and embeddings (llm_topic_labels, llm_embed); installs llm plus the ollama plugin, so OpenAI works with OPENAI_API_KEY and a fully local path runs through ollama

Combine extras in one install, e.g. pip install "topica[llm,viz,formula]". For local sentence-transformer embeddings add llm-sentence-transformers (which pulls in PyTorch); ollama's own embedding models need nothing extra. Two more packages also light up if already present: pyLDAvis (interactive intertopic-distance charts) and pandas (tabular handling of effect/diagnostic tables).

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