Complexity of Inference in Latent Dirichlet Allocation

author: David Sontag, Computer Science Department, New York University (NYU)
published: Sept. 6, 2012,   recorded: December 2011,   views: 3420
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Description

We consider the computational complexity of probabilistic inference in Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). First, we study the problem of finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment of topics to words, where the document's topic distribution is integrated out. We show that, when the effective number of topics per document is small, exact inference takes polynomial time. In contrast, we show that, when a document has a large number of topics, finding the MAP assignment of topics to words in LDA is NP-hard. Next, we consider the problem of finding the MAP topic distribution for a document, where the topic-word assignments are integrated out. We show that this problem is also NP-hard. Finally, we briefly discuss the problem of sampling from the posterior, showing that this is NP-hard in one restricted setting, but leaving open the general question.

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Download slides icon Download slides: nips2011_sontag_allocation_01.pdf (1.8 MB)

Download article icon Download article: nips2011_0622.pdf (572.4 KB)


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