Communication-Efficient Distributed Statistical Inference

ABSTRACT

We present a communication-efficient surrogate likelihood (CSL) framework for solving distributed statistical inference problems. CSL provides a communication-efficient surrogate to the global likelihood that can be used for low-dimensional estimation, high-dimensional regularized estimation, and Bayesian inference. For low-dimensional estimation, CSL provably improves upon naive averaging schemes and facilitates the construction of confidence intervals. For high-dimensional regularized estimation, CSL leads to a minimax-optimal estimator with controlled communication cost. For Bayesian inference, CSL can be used to form a communication-efficient quasi-posterior distribution that converges to the true posterior. This quasi-posterior procedure significantly improves the computational efficiency of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms even in a nondistributed setting. We present both theoretical analysis and experiments to explore the properties of the CSL approximation. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication efficiency
• Distributed inference
• Likelihood approximation

Supplementary Materials

The supplementary materials contain the appendices for the article.