37,004 research outputs found
Computing Web-scale Topic Models using an Asynchronous Parameter Server
Topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have been widely used
in information retrieval for tasks ranging from smoothing and feedback methods
to tools for exploratory search and discovery. However, classical methods for
inferring topic models do not scale up to the massive size of today's publicly
available Web-scale data sets. The state-of-the-art approaches rely on custom
strategies, implementations and hardware to facilitate their asynchronous,
communication-intensive workloads.
We present APS-LDA, which integrates state-of-the-art topic modeling with
cluster computing frameworks such as Spark using a novel asynchronous parameter
server. Advantages of this integration include convenient usage of existing
data processing pipelines and eliminating the need for disk writes as data can
be kept in memory from start to finish. Our goal is not to outperform highly
customized implementations, but to propose a general high-performance topic
modeling framework that can easily be used in today's data processing
pipelines. We compare APS-LDA to the existing Spark LDA implementations and
show that our system can, on a 480-core cluster, process up to 135 times more
data and 10 times more topics without sacrificing model quality.Comment: To appear in SIGIR 201
A Scalable Asynchronous Distributed Algorithm for Topic Modeling
Learning meaningful topic models with massive document collections which
contain millions of documents and billions of tokens is challenging because of
two reasons: First, one needs to deal with a large number of topics (typically
in the order of thousands). Second, one needs a scalable and efficient way of
distributing the computation across multiple machines. In this paper we present
a novel algorithm F+Nomad LDA which simultaneously tackles both these problems.
In order to handle large number of topics we use an appropriately modified
Fenwick tree. This data structure allows us to sample from a multinomial
distribution over items in time. Moreover, when topic counts
change the data structure can be updated in time. In order to
distribute the computation across multiple processor we present a novel
asynchronous framework inspired by the Nomad algorithm of
\cite{YunYuHsietal13}. We show that F+Nomad LDA significantly outperform
state-of-the-art on massive problems which involve millions of documents,
billions of words, and thousands of topics
Memory-Efficient Topic Modeling
As one of the simplest probabilistic topic modeling techniques, latent
Dirichlet allocation (LDA) has found many important applications in text
mining, computer vision and computational biology. Recent training algorithms
for LDA can be interpreted within a unified message passing framework. However,
message passing requires storing previous messages with a large amount of
memory space, increasing linearly with the number of documents or the number of
topics. Therefore, the high memory usage is often a major problem for topic
modeling of massive corpora containing a large number of topics. To reduce the
space complexity, we propose a novel algorithm without storing previous
messages for training LDA: tiny belief propagation (TBP). The basic idea of TBP
relates the message passing algorithms with the non-negative matrix
factorization (NMF) algorithms, which absorb the message updating into the
message passing process, and thus avoid storing previous messages. Experimental
results on four large data sets confirm that TBP performs comparably well or
even better than current state-of-the-art training algorithms for LDA but with
a much less memory consumption. TBP can do topic modeling when massive corpora
cannot fit in the computer memory, for example, extracting thematic topics from
7 GB PUBMED corpora on a common desktop computer with 2GB memory.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
Streaming, Distributed Variational Inference for Bayesian Nonparametrics
This paper presents a methodology for creating streaming, distributed
inference algorithms for Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) models. In the proposed
framework, processing nodes receive a sequence of data minibatches, compute a
variational posterior for each, and make asynchronous streaming updates to a
central model. In contrast to previous algorithms, the proposed framework is
truly streaming, distributed, asynchronous, learning-rate-free, and
truncation-free. The key challenge in developing the framework, arising from
the fact that BNP models do not impose an inherent ordering on their
components, is finding the correspondence between minibatch and central BNP
posterior components before performing each update. To address this, the paper
develops a combinatorial optimization problem over component correspondences,
and provides an efficient solution technique. The paper concludes with an
application of the methodology to the DP mixture model, with experimental
results demonstrating its practical scalability and performance.Comment: This paper was presented at NIPS 2015. Please use the following
BibTeX citation: @inproceedings{Campbell15_NIPS, Author = {Trevor Campbell
and Julian Straub and John W. {Fisher III} and Jonathan P. How}, Title =
{Streaming, Distributed Variational Inference for Bayesian Nonparametrics},
Booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)}, Year
= {2015}
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