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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

topics (development version)

topics 0.65

New Functions

  • topicsTutorialData(): New utility function to download and prepare long-text essay data directly from Hugging Face. Supports custom sample_size, min_word_count, max_word_count, and seed.
  • topicsPlotOverview(): Introduced a high-level plotting function for structured overviews. Supports side-by-side comparisons (ngrams), 1D layouts, and 2-D 3x3 grids with a central distribution plot.

Improvements to topicsTest()

  • Categorical Variable Support: x_variable and y_variable now fully support Factors and Character vectors.
  • Intelligent Method Detection: The test_method is now assigned per-variable. The package automatically detects binary data (0/1 or 2-level factors) to apply logistic_regression while using linear_regression for continuous data.
  • Baseline Reporting: Logistic regression results now include a logistic_level string in the output list to clarify the Baseline (0) vs. Target (1) mapping.

Enhancements & Aliases

topics 0.60

CRAN release: 2025-07-22

  • ready for CRAN and installation-harmonized with the text-package.

topics 0.54

  • topicsGrams() now uses exact word boundary matching for n-grams (e.g., “lack” is matched as a standalone word, excluding partial matches like “black” or “lacking”).
  • added ability to handle NAs in topicsTest().

topics 0.51

  • adding function to plot circles in the scatter legend.
  • fixing where non-significant plots were the same.
  • improving the structure of the creat_plot help function.
  • moving rJava to suggest to enable compatibility with the text-package.

topics 0.40.6

  • addting scatter_legend_dots_alpha and scatter_legend_bg_dots_alpha parameters for the topicsPlot() function.
  • adding setting for having the dot sizes according to their prevalence.

topics 0.40.5

  • Fixing bug when plotting test based on logistic_regression.

topics 0.40.3 - 0.40.4

  • added occurance_rate to topicsGrams()
  • added removal_mode, removal_rate_most and removal_rate_least to topicsGrams()
  • ngram_window = c(1) now supported by topicsDtm()
  • legend added to topicsPlot() with ngrams
  • The size in the dot legend will be based on prevalence if scatter_legend_dot_size = “prevalence”. And the popouts are not transparent.
  • Fix the issues of tick and label of the x-axis in 1-dim dot legend.
  • Able to save the pop-out grey topics in the target folder.
  • Fix the bugs of rounding in generate_scatter_plot.
  • The default value of highlight_topic_words is set to NULL in the topicsPlot() function.

topics 0.40.2

  • changed some behaviours in topicsGrams(), including removing top_n and treating n-grams type differently.
  • added stopwords function to topicsGrams().
  • fixed the pmi calculation.
  • fixed the ngrams_max parameter in `topicsPlot()```.

topics 0.40.1

  • adding allowed_word_overlap in topicsPlot() for plotting the most prevalence.
  • improving help texts
  • highlight_topic_words parameter to add different colours for a word list.
  • added stopwords removal for topicsGram().
  • added ngrams_max functionality to topicsPlot().

topics 0.40.

  • removing save_dir and load_dir from all function; only topicsPlot() now has the save_dir as an option.
  • size of the dots in distributions can be plotted according to prevalence.
  • adding p_adjust_method to topicsPlots().

topics 0.30.5

  • plots are not added as a list (and not only saved to the folder)
  • added scatter_show_axis_values to the topcisPlot().
  • adding feature to plot the n_most_prevalent_topics.

topics 0.30.4

  • scaling controls with scale instead of manually resulting in slightly different estimates. (but still same p-value and t-values)
  • removed ridge regression, t-test and correlation codes since they did not work
  • removed automatic removal of NAs in the topics predictions (this should be handled explicitly).
  • topicsTest() default to linear_regression if not the variable only contains 0s and 1s; i.e., now different tests can be applied to different axes.

topics 0.30.3

  • saving settings in dtm for downstream use in other functions.
  • adding parameters in the topicsPred() function including num_iteration, sampling_interval, burn_in.
  • implemented create_new_dtm for creating a new dtm for new data
  • adding test for using topics dimension for training using textTrainRegression().
  • removing forcing user to set save_dir on most functions (only need to do it for topics functions).

topics 0.30.2

  • fixing coherence bug
  • showing prevalence and coherence for in results
  • restructuring the files

topics 0.30.0

  • Harmonizing parameters in topicsTest() incl. x_variable, y_variable and controls
  • fixing error that variable names cannot be names with 1 underscore.

topics 0.22.1

  • added pmi_threshold (experimental) to topicsDtm()
  • removed the saving of raw data and the split procedure in the topicsDtm()
  • adding function that name emphasized topics so the file name starts with 0_.
  • add a parameter to turn off the shuffling of the data in topicsDtm()

topics 0.22

  • change p_threshold to p_alpha
  • moved p_alpha from the topicsTest() function to the topicsPlots() function
  • removed unnecessary list items from topicsTest()

topics 0.21

  • Changes related to compatability with the text-package

topics 0.20

  • Cleaning up code and ensuring improved compatibility across platforms.
  • Started the journey of improving documentation.

topics 0.10.1

Change

  • Removing dim and grid_plot arguments in topicsPlot().
  • Fixing the color bugs.
  • Adding possibility for the user to use gradient colors in all plots.
  • Adding a stop warning when the variable name contains an underscore in topicsTest().

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