Parallelizing a Convergent Approximate Inference Method

Abstract

The ability to efficiently perform probabilistic inference task is critical to large scale applications in statistics and artificial intelligence. Dramatic speedup might be achieved by appropriately mapping the current inference algorithms to the parallel framework. Parallel exact inference methods still suffer from exponential complexity in the worst case. Approximate inference methods have been parallelized and good speedup is achieved. In this paper, we focus on a variant of Belief Propagation algorithm. This variant has better convergent property and is provably convergent under certain conditions. We show that this method is amenable to coarse-grained parallelization and propose techniques to optimally parallelize it without sacrificing convergence. Experiments on a shared memory systems demonstrate that near-ideal speedup is achieved with reasonable scalability.