We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation and the hierarchical Dirichlet process topic model. Using stochastic variational inference, we analyze several large collections of documents: 300K articles from Nature, 1.8M articles from The New York Times, and 3.8M articles from Wikipedia. Stochastic inference can handle the full data, and outperforms traditional variational inference on a subset. (Further, we show that the Bayesian nonparametric topic model outperforms its parametric counterpart.) Stochastic variational inference lets us apply complex Bayesian models to very large data sets.

本研究开发了基于随机变分推断的可伸缩算法，用于逼近后验概率分布，并且针对一类大规模的概率模型进行了技术开发；对两个概率主题模型进行了演示并应用于大量文献数据的分析，其中包括自然杂志、《纽约时报》和维基百科，结果表明随机变分推断可轻松处理大型数据集并优于传统变分推断，并且表明贝叶斯非参数主题模型优于参数主题模型；因此基于随机变分推断的算法可以将复杂的贝叶斯模型应用于大规模的数据集。