Distributed Bayesian matrix factorization with limited communication

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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Date
2019-01-01
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
1-26
Series
Machine Learning
Abstract
Bayesian matrix factorization (BMF) is a powerful tool for producing low-rank representations of matrices and for predicting missing values and providing confidence intervals. Scaling up the posterior inference for massive-scale matrices is challenging and requires distributing both data and computation over many workers, making communication the main computational bottleneck. Embarrassingly parallel inference would remove the communication needed, by using completely independent computations on different data subsets, but it suffers from the inherent unidentifiability of BMF solutions. We introduce a hierarchical decomposition of the joint posterior distribution, which couples the subset inferences, allowing for embarrassingly parallel computations in a sequence of at most three stages. Using an efficient approximate implementation, we show improvements empirically on both real and simulated data. Our distributed approach is able to achieve a speed-up of almost an order of magnitude over the full posterior, with a negligible effect on predictive accuracy. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art embarrassingly parallel MCMC methods in accuracy, and achieves results competitive to other available distributed and parallel implementations of BMF.
Description
| openaire: EC/H2020/671555/EU//ExCAPE
Keywords
Bayesian matrix factorization, Distributed inference, Embarrassingly parallel MCMC, Posterior propagation, Software, Artificial Intelligence, 113 Computer and information sciences
Other note
Citation
Qin , X , Blomstedt , P , Leppäaho , E , Parviainen , P & Kaski , S 2019 , ' Distributed Bayesian matrix factorization with limited communication ' , Machine Learning , pp. 1-26 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-019-05778-2