A New Approach to Speeding Up Topic Modeling

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a widely-used probabilistic topic modeling paradigm, and recently finds many applications in computer vision and computational biology. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate batch algorithm, active belief propagation (ABP), for training LDA. Usually batch LDA algorithms require repeated scanning of the entire corpus and searching the complete topic space. To process massive corpora having a large number of topics, the training iteration of batch LDA algorithms is often inefficient and time-consuming. To accelerate the training speed, ABP actively scans the subset of corpus and searches the subset of topic space for topic modeling, therefore saves enormous training time in each iteration. To ensure accuracy, ABP selects only those documents and topics that contribute to the largest residuals within the residual belief propagation (RBP) framework. On four real-world corpora, ABP performs around $10$ to $100$ times faster than state-of-the-art batch LDA algorithms with a comparable topic modeling accuracy.