28 research outputs found
Revisiting the Nystrom Method for Improved Large-Scale Machine Learning
We reconsider randomized algorithms for the low-rank approximation of
symmetric positive semi-definite (SPSD) matrices such as Laplacian and kernel
matrices that arise in data analysis and machine learning applications. Our
main results consist of an empirical evaluation of the performance quality and
running time of sampling and projection methods on a diverse suite of SPSD
matrices. Our results highlight complementary aspects of sampling versus
projection methods; they characterize the effects of common data preprocessing
steps on the performance of these algorithms; and they point to important
differences between uniform sampling and nonuniform sampling methods based on
leverage scores. In addition, our empirical results illustrate that existing
theory is so weak that it does not provide even a qualitative guide to
practice. Thus, we complement our empirical results with a suite of worst-case
theoretical bounds for both random sampling and random projection methods.
These bounds are qualitatively superior to existing bounds---e.g. improved
additive-error bounds for spectral and Frobenius norm error and relative-error
bounds for trace norm error---and they point to future directions to make these
algorithms useful in even larger-scale machine learning applications.Comment: 60 pages, 15 color figures; updated proof of Frobenius norm bounds,
added comparison to projection-based low-rank approximations, and an analysis
of the power method applied to SPSD sketche
Less is More: Nystr\"om Computational Regularization
We study Nystr\"om type subsampling approaches to large scale kernel methods,
and prove learning bounds in the statistical learning setting, where random
sampling and high probability estimates are considered. In particular, we prove
that these approaches can achieve optimal learning bounds, provided the
subsampling level is suitably chosen. These results suggest a simple
incremental variant of Nystr\"om Kernel Regularized Least Squares, where the
subsampling level implements a form of computational regularization, in the
sense that it controls at the same time regularization and computations.
Extensive experimental analysis shows that the considered approach achieves
state of the art performances on benchmark large scale datasets.Comment: updated version of NIPS 2015 (oral
Provable Deterministic Leverage Score Sampling
We explain theoretically a curious empirical phenomenon: "Approximating a
matrix by deterministically selecting a subset of its columns with the
corresponding largest leverage scores results in a good low-rank matrix
surrogate". To obtain provable guarantees, previous work requires randomized
sampling of the columns with probabilities proportional to their leverage
scores.
In this work, we provide a novel theoretical analysis of deterministic
leverage score sampling. We show that such deterministic sampling can be
provably as accurate as its randomized counterparts, if the leverage scores
follow a moderately steep power-law decay. We support this power-law assumption
by providing empirical evidence that such decay laws are abundant in real-world
data sets. We then demonstrate empirically the performance of deterministic
leverage score sampling, which many times matches or outperforms the
state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Minin