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LIT-1627: Stick-breaking Construction for the Indian Buffet Process

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Properties6
StatusActive — read 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1210) in full, from PMLR's own PDF; worth reading for the stick-breaking construction of the Indian buffet process, in which the feature probabilities in decreasing order are products of independent Beta(α, 1) draws, for its duality with the Dirichlet process's sticks, and for the slice samplers it licenses, which the Markov IBP's inference uses (THEORY-1041). Read it knowing that its truncation is described but its error is not computed, that its sampler comparison is reported only as a chart of autocorrelation times, and that its MNIST demonstration is a single run judged by eye.
Version2
Tagsprobabilistic-modeling, mathematical-statistics
ExtendsLIT-1623 — Infinite Latent Feature Models and the Indian Buffet Process
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1210 — Teh, Görür and Ghahramani — Stick-breaking construction for the Indian buffet process
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1041 — In the Indian buffet process the feature probabilities in decreasing order are products of independent Beta(α, 1) draws, so the k-th has mean (α/(α + 1))^k, and keeping only the first K of them gives an expected number of occupied features among N objects that approaches αH_N from below: 8.97 at K = 16, N = 12 and α = 3, against 9.31 in the limit and 6.83 for the finite model with sixteen independent prevalences

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Teh, Y. W., Görür, D. & Ghahramani, Z. (2007). Stick-breaking construction for the Indian buffet process. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 2: 556–563.

Read in full on 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1210). One account was drawn from it: THEORY-1041.

Why this is here

The owner asked on 2026-10-27 to “file the next readings”. The Markov IBP (LIT-1577, §2.4) rests on this construction for its slice sampler, and the IBP review (LIT-1556) names it among the process’s variants. CASE-165 (item 1) says that “a stick-breaking truncation at 16 would be close” to the buffet’s count, 8.97 against 9.31, simulated; this is the construction that statement is about, and the record held it only by name.

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