Scalable Inference for Logistic-Normal Topic Models

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013)

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Authors

Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu, Zi Wang, Xun Zheng, Bo Zhang

Abstract

Logistic-normal topic models can effectively discover correlation structures among latent topics. However, their inference remains a challenge because of the non-conjugacy between the logistic-normal prior and multinomial topic mixing proportions. Existing algorithms either make restricting mean-field assumptions or are not scalable to large-scale applications. This paper presents a partially collapsed Gibbs sampling algorithm that approaches the provably correct distribution by exploring the ideas of data augmentation. To improve time efficiency, we further present a parallel implementation that can deal with large-scale applications and learn the correlation structures of thousands of topics from millions of documents. Extensive empirical results demonstrate the promise.