SpectralLeader: Online Spectral Learning for Single Topic Models

We study the problem of learning a latent variable model from a stream of data. Latent variable models are popular in practice because they can explain observed data in terms of unobserved concepts. These models have been traditionally studied in the offline setting. The online EM is arguably the most popular algorithm for learning latent variable models online. Although it is computationally efficient, it typically converges to a local optimum. In this work, we develop a new online learning algorithm for latent variable models, which we call SpectralLeader. SpectralLeader always converges to the global optimum, and we derive a $O(\sqrt{n})$ upper bound up to log factors on its $n$-step regret in the bag-of-words model. We show that SpectralLeader performs similarly to or better than the online EM with tuned hyper-parameters, in both synthetic and real-world experiments.