Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a generative probabilistic model for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. LDA represents documents as random mixtures over latent topics, characterized by probability distributions over words. LDA addresses limitations of previous topic models like pLSI by treating topic mixtures as random variables rather than document-specific parameters. Variational inference and EM algorithms are used for parameter estimation in LDA. Empirical results show LDA outperforms other models on tasks like document modeling, classification, and collaborative filtering.