Enhancing the Understanding of Environmental Microbiomes through Topic Modeling: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Background Understanding ecosystem dynamics is essential for assessing ecosystem health, yet remains challenging due to complex biotic and abiotic interactions. Microbial communities are valuable indicators of environmental change, but the high dimensionality of microbiome data requires advanced analytical methods. This study explores the use of topic modeling (TM), an unsupervised machine learning approach initially designed for text analysis, to analyze microbiome data from the dynamic Warnow Estuary on the southern Baltic Sea coast. Results We applied TM to estuarine microbiome data and compared its performance to traditional dimensionality reduction methods, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA). Quantitative results indicate that TM performs comparably to conventional approaches in preserving ecological and functional information, and in certain aspects even superior. In addition, we show qualitatively that NNMF, a TM method, captures latent patterns in the data providing an interpretable perspective on the microbiome. In this exploratory framework, NNMF suggested five distinct sub-communities within the estuary that appear to follow a seasonal succession influenced by freshwater inflow. These sub-communities were associated with specific ranges of salinity and temperature and showed distinct taxonomic profiles, with shared characteristics across the estuarine system. Conclusions Our findings suggest that TM is a useful tool for exploring complex environmental microbiome datasets, offering a complementary perspective that can provide additional ecological insights. TM’s ability to highlight coherent microbial community patterns indicates its promise for supporting environmental monitoring and informing targeted ecosystem management in dynamic habitats, though further studies are needed to fully assess its applicability.