diff --git a/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/api/python/LDAModelWrapper.scala b/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/api/python/LDAModelWrapper.scala
index 63282eee6e65..dd02c3a82d02 100644
--- a/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/api/python/LDAModelWrapper.scala
+++ b/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/api/python/LDAModelWrapper.scala
@@ -16,11 +16,13 @@
  */
 package org.apache.spark.mllib.api.python
 
-import scala.collection.JavaConverters
+import scala.collection.JavaConverters._
 
+import org.apache.spark.api.java.JavaRDD
 import org.apache.spark.SparkContext
 import org.apache.spark.mllib.clustering.LDAModel
-import org.apache.spark.mllib.linalg.Matrix
+import org.apache.spark.mllib.linalg.{Matrix, Vector}
+import org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD
 
 /**
  * Wrapper around LDAModel to provide helper methods in Python
@@ -35,11 +37,30 @@ private[python] class LDAModelWrapper(model: LDAModel) {
 
   def describeTopics(maxTermsPerTopic: Int): Array[Byte] = {
     val topics = model.describeTopics(maxTermsPerTopic).map { case (terms, termWeights) =>
-      val jTerms = JavaConverters.seqAsJavaListConverter(terms).asJava
-      val jTermWeights = JavaConverters.seqAsJavaListConverter(termWeights).asJava
+      val jTerms = seqAsJavaListConverter(terms).asJava
+      val jTermWeights = seqAsJavaListConverter(termWeights).asJava
       Array[Any](jTerms, jTermWeights)
     }
-    SerDe.dumps(JavaConverters.seqAsJavaListConverter(topics).asJava)
+    SerDe.dumps(seqAsJavaListConverter(topics).asJava)
+  }
+
+  def topicDistributions(
+    data: JavaRDD[java.util.List[Any]]): JavaRDD[Array[Any]] = {
+
+    val documents = data.rdd.map(_.asScala.toArray).map { r =>
+      r(0) match {
+        case i: java.lang.Integer => (i.toLong, r(1).asInstanceOf[Vector])
+        case i: java.lang.Long => (i.toLong, r(1).asInstanceOf[Vector])
+        case _ => throw new IllegalArgumentException("input values contains invalid type value.")
+      }
+    }
+
+    val distributions = model.topicDistributions(documents)
+
+    SerDe.fromTuple2RDD( distributions.map {
+      case (id, vector) => ( id.toLong, vector.asInstanceOf[ Vector ] )
+    }.asInstanceOf[ RDD[(Any, Any)] ])
+
   }
 
   def save(sc: SparkContext, path: String): Unit = model.save(sc, path)
diff --git a/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/clustering/LDAModel.scala b/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/clustering/LDAModel.scala
index 90d8a558f10d..c7b760c3d19c 100644
--- a/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/clustering/LDAModel.scala
+++ b/mllib/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/mllib/clustering/LDAModel.scala
@@ -176,7 +176,7 @@ abstract class LDAModel private[clustering] extends Saveable {
    *          The returned RDD may be zipped with the given RDD, where each returned vector
    *          is a multinomial distribution over topics.
    */
-  // def topicDistributions(documents: RDD[(Long, Vector)]): RDD[(Long, Vector)]
+  def topicDistributions(documents: RDD[(Long, Vector)]): RDD[(Long, Vector)]
 
 }
 
@@ -341,7 +341,7 @@ class LocalLDAModel private[spark] (
    */
   @Since("1.3.0")
   // TODO: declare in LDAModel and override once implemented in DistributedLDAModel
-  def topicDistributions(documents: RDD[(Long, Vector)]): RDD[(Long, Vector)] = {
+  override def topicDistributions(documents: RDD[(Long, Vector)]): RDD[(Long, Vector)] = {
     // Double transpose because dirichletExpectation normalizes by row and we need to normalize
     // by topic (columns of lambda)
     val expElogbeta = exp(LDAUtils.dirichletExpectation(topicsMatrix.asBreeze.toDenseMatrix.t).t)
@@ -777,6 +777,10 @@ class DistributedLDAModel private[clustering] (
     JavaPairRDD.fromRDD(topicDistributions.asInstanceOf[RDD[(java.lang.Long, Vector)]])
   }
 
+  override def topicDistributions(documents: RDD[(Long, Vector)]): RDD[(Long, Vector)] = {
+    throw new NotImplementedError("Convert to LocalLDAModel or use online optimizer.")
+  }
+
   /**
    * For each document, return the top k weighted topics for that document and their weights.
    * @return RDD of (doc ID, topic indices, topic weights)
diff --git a/python/pyspark/mllib/clustering.py b/python/pyspark/mllib/clustering.py
index c8c3c42774f2..ebdacaee01c7 100644
--- a/python/pyspark/mllib/clustering.py
+++ b/python/pyspark/mllib/clustering.py
@@ -972,6 +972,20 @@ def describeTopics(self, maxTermsPerTopic=None):
             topics = self.call("describeTopics", maxTermsPerTopic)
         return topics
 
+    def topicDistributions(self, documents):
+        """
+        Compute the estimated topic distribution for each document.
+        This is often called 'theta' in the literature.
+        :param documents:
+          RDD of document id and features.
+        :return:
+          RDD where each row is a tuple of document id and array of
+          estimated topic distribution for k topics.
+        """
+        if not isinstance(documents, RDD):
+            raise TypeError("documents should be rdd, got type %s" % type(documents))
+        return self.call("topicDistributions", documents)
+
     @classmethod
     @since('1.5.0')
     def load(cls, sc, path):