Topic models for non-textual data?
I think that you can use a topic model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). For example, in this paper https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9e6f/33bdd04df0536f6ad6783d33cccfbc54b1b1.pdf it is used for music and images. I suggest you to take a look at it :) . In general, in topic modeling you end up with a list of topics, where each topic contains a set of associated keywords. In clustering, depending on the algorithm, you might have hierarchy of dependencies. You can also use algorithms which assign each sample to only one class. In addition to this, when doing clustering, you usually have a distance metric which you have to pre-define (e.g. Euclidean distance). The topic models, especially LDA are based on the assumption that your data represents a distribution of topics with their corresponding distribution of keywords (one keyword can be contained in many topics). In other words, you already assume how the texts/documents have been generated.