Polya Urn Latent Dirichlet Allocation: A Doubly Sparse Massively Parallel Sampler
2019 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, ISSN 0162-8828, E-ISSN 1939-3539, Vol. 41, no 7, p. 1709-1719Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a topic model widely used in natural language processing and machine learning. Most approaches to training the model rely on iterative algorithms, which makes it difficult to run LDA on big corpora that are best analyzed in parallel and distributed computational environments. Indeed, current approaches to parallel inference either dont converge to the correct posterior or require storage of large dense matrices in memory. We present a novel sampler that overcomes both problems, and we show that this sampler is faster, both empirically and theoretically, than previous Gibbs samplers for LDA. We do so by employing a novel Polya-urn-based approximation in the sparse partially collapsed sampler for LDA. We prove that the approximation error vanishes with data size, making our algorithm asymptotically exact, a property of importance for large-scale topic models. In addition, we show, via an explicit example, that-contrary to popular belief in the topic modeling literature-partially collapsed samplers can be more efficient than fully collapsed samplers. We conclude by comparing the performance of our algorithm with that of other approaches on well-known corpora.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE COMPUTER SOC , 2019. Vol. 41, no 7, p. 1709-1719
Keywords [en]
Bayesian inference; big data; computational complexity; gibbs sampling; latent dirichlet allocation; markov chain monte carlo; natural language processing; parallel and distributed systems; topic models
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-158856DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2018.2832641ISI: 000470972300014PubMedID: 29994329OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-158856DiVA, id: diva2:1337638
Note
Funding Agencies|Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research [RIT 15-0097]
2019-07-162019-07-162021-01-26