Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising
candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large
datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily
in the context of Bayesian topic models, particularly latent Dirichlet
allocation (LDA). Deriving several new algorithms, and using synthetic, image
and genomic datasets, we investigate whether the understanding gleaned from LDA
applies in the setting of sparse latent factor models, specifically beta
process factor analysis (BPFA). We demonstrate that the big picture is
consistent: using Gibbs sampling within SVI to maintain certain posterior
dependencies is extremely effective. However, we find that different posterior
dependencies are important in BPFA relative to LDA. Particularly,
approximations able to model intra-local variable dependence perform best.

研究使用 SVI 在稀疏潜在因子模型（尤其是 BPFA）中的性能，发现使用 Gibbs 采样维护特定后验依赖关系非常有效，但在 BPFA 中不同的后验依赖关系与 LDA 不同，并且模拟内局部变量依赖性的近似方法表现最佳。