We present a new approach to estimating the interdependence of industries in
an economy by applying data science solutions. By exploiting interfirm
buyer--seller network data, we show that the problem of estimating the
interdependence of industries is similar to the problem of uncovering the
latent block structure in network science literature. To estimate the
underlying structure with greater accuracy, we propose an extension of the
sparse block model that incorporates node textual information and an unbounded
number of industries and interactions among them. The latter task is
accomplished by extending the well-known Chinese restaurant process to two
dimensions. Inference is based on collapsed Gibbs sampling, and the model is
evaluated on both synthetic and real-world datasets. We show that the proposed
model improves in predictive accuracy and successfully provides a satisfactory
solution to the motivated problem. We also discuss issues that affect the
future performance of this approach.