Communication-efficient algorithms for parallel latent Dirichlet allocation

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a popular topic modeling method which has found many multimedia applications, such as motion analysis and image categorization. Communication cost is one of the main bottlenecks for large-scale parallel learning of LDA. To reduce communication cost, we introduce Zipf’s law and propose novel parallel LDA algorithms that communicate only partial important information at each learning iteration. The proposed algorithms are much more efficient than the current state-of-the art algorithms in both communication and computation costs. Extensive experiments on large-scale data sets demonstrate that our algorithms can greatly reduce communication and computation costs to achieve a better scalability.