## AMIDST

 swMATH ID: 21741 Software Authors: Masegosa, Andrés R.; Martinez, Ana M.; Langseth, Helge; Nielsen, Thomas D.; Salmerón, Antonio; Ramos-López, Darío; Madsen, Anders L. Description: Scaling up Bayesian variational inference using distributed computing clusters. In this paper we present an approach for scaling up Bayesian learning using variational methods by exploiting distributed computing clusters managed by modern big data processing tools like Apache Spark or Apache Flink, which efficiently support iterative map-reduce operations. Our approach is defined as a distributed projected natural gradient ascent algorithm, has excellent convergence properties, and covers a wide range of conjugate exponential family models. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on three real-world datasets from different domains (the Pubmed abstracts dataset, a GPS trajectory dataset, and a financial dataset) and using several models (LDA, factor analysis, mixture of Gaussians and linear regression models). Our approach compares favorably to stochastic variational inference and streaming variational Bayes, two of the main current proposals for scaling up variational methods. For the scalability analysis, we evaluate our approach over a network with more than one billion nodes and approx. $$75%$$ latent variables using a computer cluster with 128 processing units (AWS). The proposed methods are released as part of an open-source toolbox for scalable probabilistic machine learning (url{http://www.amidsttoolbox.com}) Masegosa et al. (2017) [29]. Homepage: http://www.amidsttoolbox.com Keywords: probabilistic graphical models; conjugate exponential family; scalable Bayesian learning; variational inference; Apache Flink Related Software: PMTK; AIS-BN; Apache Flink; Apache Spark; Spark; AdaGrad; MLlib; UCI-ml; MapReduce; eqtl; R/qtl; qtlnet; ramidst; HUGIN; gRain; RHugin; pcalg; deal; bnlearn; catnet Referenced in: 4 Publications
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### Referenced by 13 Authors

 2 Langseth, Helge 2 Madsen, Anders L. 2 Masegosa, Andrés R. 2 Nielsen, Thomas D. 2 Ramos-López, Darío 2 Salmerón, Antonio 1 Fenton, Norman E. 1 Lim, Kartleong 1 Lin, Peng 1 Martínez, Ana M. 1 Neil, Martin 1 Rumí, Rafael 1 Wang, Han

### Referenced in 2 Serials

 3 International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 1 The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)

### Referenced in 3 Fields

 4 Statistics (62-XX) 2 Computer science (68-XX) 1 Probability theory and stochastic processes (60-XX)