Communication-Efficient Parallel Belief Propagation for Latent Dirichlet Allocation

This paper presents a novel communication-efficient parallel belief propagation (CE-PBP) algorithm for training latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Based on the synchronous belief propagation (BP) algorithm, we first develop a parallel belief propagation (PBP) algorithm on the parallel architecture. Because the extensive communication delay often causes a low efficiency of parallel topic modeling, we further use Zipf’s law to reduce the total communication cost in PBP. Extensive experiments on different data sets demonstrate that CE-PBP achieves a higher topic modeling accuracy and reduces more than 80% communication cost than the state-of-the-art parallel Gibbs sampling (PGS) algorithm.