WarpLDA

Abstract

Developing efficient and scalable algorithms for Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is of wide interest for many applications. Previous work has developed an O (1) Metropolis-Hastings (MH) sampling method for each token. However, its performance is far from being optimal due to frequent cache misses caused by random accesses to the parameter matrices. In this paper, we first carefully analyze the memory access behavior of existing algorithms for LDA by cache locality at document level. We then develop WarpLDA, which achieves O (1) time complexity per-token and fits the randomly accessed memory perdocument in the L3 cache. Our empirical results in a wide range of testing conditions demonstrate that WarpLDA is consistently 5-15x faster than the state-of-the-art MH-based LightLDA, and is faster than the state-of-the-art sparsity aware F+LDA in most settings. Our WarpLDA learns a million topics from 639 millions of documents in only five hours at an unprecedented throughput of 11 billion tokens per second.