Approximation and Streaming Algorithms for Projective Clustering via Random Projections

Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the projective clustering problem, given $k, q$ and norm $\rho \in [1,\infty]$, we have to compute a set $\mathcal{F}$ of $k$ $q$-dimensional flats such that $(\sum_{p\in P}d(p, \mathcal{F})^\rho)^{1/\rho}$ is minimized; here $d(p, \mathcal{F})$ represents the (Euclidean) distance of $p$ to the closest flat in $\mathcal{F}$. We let $f_k^q(P,\rho)$ denote the minimal value and interpret $f_k^q(P,\infty)$ to be $\max_{r\in P}d(r, \mathcal{F})$. When $\rho=1,2$ and $\infty$ and $q=0$, the problem corresponds to the $k$-median, $k$-mean and the $k$-center clustering problems respectively. For every $0 < \epsilon < 1$, $S\subset P$ and $\rho \ge 1$, we show that the orthogonal projection of $P$ onto a randomly chosen flat of dimension $O(((q+1)^2\log(1/\epsilon)/\epsilon^3) \log n)$ will $\epsilon$-approximate $f_1^q(S,\rho)$. This result combines the concepts of geometric coresets and subspace embeddings based on the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma. As a consequence, an orthogonal projection of $P$ to an $O(((q+1)^2 \log ((q+1)/\epsilon)/\epsilon^3) \log n)$ dimensional randomly chosen subspace $\epsilon$-approximates projective clusterings for every $k$ and $\rho$ simultaneously. Note that the dimension of this subspace is independent of the number of clusters~$k$. Using this dimension reduction result, we obtain new approximation and streaming algorithms for projective clustering problems. For example, given a stream of $n$ points, we show how to compute an $\epsilon$-approximate projective clustering for every $k$ and $\rho$ simultaneously using only $O((n+d)((q+1)^2\log ((q+1)/\epsilon))/\epsilon^3 \log n)$ space. Compared to standard streaming algorithms with $\Omega(kd)$ space requirement, our approach is a significant improvement when the number of input points and their dimensions are of the same order of magnitude.Comment: Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2015

Far-Field Compression for Fast Kernel Summation Methods in High Dimensions

We consider fast kernel summations in high dimensions: given a large set of points in $d$ dimensions (with $d \gg 3$) and a pair-potential function (the {\em kernel} function), we compute a weighted sum of all pairwise kernel interactions for each point in the set. Direct summation is equivalent to a (dense) matrix-vector multiplication and scales quadratically with the number of points. Fast kernel summation algorithms reduce this cost to log-linear or linear complexity. Treecodes and Fast Multipole Methods (FMMs) deliver tremendous speedups by constructing approximate representations of interactions of points that are far from each other. In algebraic terms, these representations correspond to low-rank approximations of blocks of the overall interaction matrix. Existing approaches require an excessive number of kernel evaluations with increasing $d$ and number of points in the dataset. To address this issue, we use a randomized algebraic approach in which we first sample the rows of a block and then construct its approximate, low-rank interpolative decomposition. We examine the feasibility of this approach theoretically and experimentally. We provide a new theoretical result showing a tighter bound on the reconstruction error from uniformly sampling rows than the existing state-of-the-art. We demonstrate that our sampling approach is competitive with existing (but prohibitively expensive) methods from the literature. We also construct kernel matrices for the Laplacian, Gaussian, and polynomial kernels -- all commonly used in physics and data analysis. We explore the numerical properties of blocks of these matrices, and show that they are amenable to our approach. Depending on the data set, our randomized algorithm can successfully compute low rank approximations in high dimensions. We report results for data sets with ambient dimensions from four to 1,000.Comment: 43 pages, 21 figure

Random projections for Bayesian regression

This article deals with random projections applied as a data reduction technique for Bayesian regression analysis. We show sufficient conditions under which the entire $d$-dimensional distribution is approximately preserved under random projections by reducing the number of data points from $n$ to $k\in O(\operatorname{poly}(d/\varepsilon))$ in the case $n\gg d$. Under mild assumptions, we prove that evaluating a Gaussian likelihood function based on the projected data instead of the original data yields a $(1+O(\varepsilon))$-approximation in terms of the $\ell_2$ Wasserstein distance. Our main result shows that the posterior distribution of Bayesian linear regression is approximated up to a small error depending on only an $\varepsilon$-fraction of its defining parameters. This holds when using arbitrary Gaussian priors or the degenerate case of uniform distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$ for $\beta$. Our empirical evaluations involve different simulated settings of Bayesian linear regression. Our experiments underline that the proposed method is able to recover the regression model up to small error while considerably reducing the total running time