Distributed Inference for Dirichlet Process Mixture Models

Bayesian nonparametric mixture models based on the Dirichlet process (DP) have been widely used for solving problems like clustering, density estimation and topic modelling. These models make weak assumptions about the underlying process that generated the observed data. Thus, when more data are collected, the complexity of these models can change accordingly. These theoretical properties often lead to superior predictive performance when compared to traditional finite mixture models. However, despite the increasing amount of data available, the application of Bayesian nonparametric mixture models is so far limited to relatively small data sets. In this paper, we propose an efficient distributed inference algorithm for the DP and the HDP mixture model. The proposed method is based on a variant of the slice sampler for DPs. Since this sampler does not involve a pre-determined truncation, the stationary distribution of the sampling algorithm is unbiased. We provide both local thread-level and distributed machine-level parallel implementations and study the performance of this sampler through an extensive set of experiments on image and text data. When compared to existing inference algorithms, the proposed method exhibits state-of-the-art accuracy and strong scalability with up to 512 cores.