Recursive Sketching For Frequency Moments

In a ground-breaking paper, Indyk and Woodruff (STOC 05) showed how to compute $F_k$ (for $k>2$) in space complexity O(\mbox{\em poly-log}(n,m)\cdot n^{1-\frac2k}), which is optimal up to (large) poly-logarithmic factors in $n$ and $m$, where $m$ is the length of the stream and $n$ is the upper bound on the number of distinct elements in a stream. The best known lower bound for large moments is $\Omega(\log(n)n^{1-\frac2k})$. A follow-up work of Bhuvanagiri, Ganguly, Kesh and Saha (SODA 2006) reduced the poly-logarithmic factors of Indyk and Woodruff to $O(\log^2(m)\cdot (\log n+ \log m)\cdot n^{1-{2\over k}})$. Further reduction of poly-log factors has been an elusive goal since 2006, when Indyk and Woodruff method seemed to hit a natural "barrier." Using our simple recursive sketch, we provide a different yet simple approach to obtain a $O(\log(m)\log(nm)\cdot (\log\log n)^4\cdot n^{1-{2\over k}})$ algorithm for constant $\epsilon$ (our bound is, in fact, somewhat stronger, where the $(\log\log n)$ term can be replaced by any constant number of $\log$ iterations instead of just two or three, thus approaching $log^*n$. Our bound also works for non-constant $\epsilon$ (for details see the body of the paper). Further, our algorithm requires only $4$-wise independence, in contrast to existing methods that use pseudo-random generators for computing large frequency moments

Approximating Subadditive Hadamard Functions on Implicit Matrices

An important challenge in the streaming model is to maintain small-space approximations of entrywise functions performed on a matrix that is generated by the outer product of two vectors given as a stream. In other works, streams typically define matrices in a standard way via a sequence of updates, as in the work of Woodruff (2014) and others. We describe the matrix formed by the outer product, and other matrices that do not fall into this category, as implicit matrices. As such, we consider the general problem of computing over such implicit matrices with Hadamard functions, which are functions applied entrywise on a matrix. In this paper, we apply this generalization to provide new techniques for identifying independence between two vectors in the streaming model. The previous state of the art algorithm of Braverman and Ostrovsky (2010) gave a $(1 \pm \epsilon)$-approximation for the $L_1$ distance between the product and joint distributions, using space $O(\log^{1024}(nm) \epsilon^{-1024})$, where $m$ is the length of the stream and $n$ denotes the size of the universe from which stream elements are drawn. Our general techniques include the $L_1$ distance as a special case, and we give an improved space bound of $O(\log^{12}(n) \log^{2}({nm \over \epsilon})\epsilon^{-7})$

Streaming Coreset Constructions for M-Estimators

We introduce a new method of maintaining a (k,epsilon)-coreset for clustering M-estimators over insertion-only streams. Let (P,w) be a weighted set (where w : P - > [0,infty) is the weight function) of points in a rho-metric space (meaning a set X equipped with a positive-semidefinite symmetric function D such that D(x,z) <=rho(D(x,y) + D(y,z)) for all x,y,z in X). For any set of points C, we define COST(P,w,C) = sum_{p in P} w(p) min_{c in C} D(p,c). A (k,epsilon)-coreset for (P,w) is a weighted set (Q,v) such that for every set C of k points, (1-epsilon)COST(P,w,C) <= COST(Q,v,C) <= (1+epsilon)COST(P,w,C). Essentially, the coreset (Q,v) can be used in place of (P,w) for all operations concerning the COST function. Coresets, as a method of data reduction, are used to solve fundamental problems in machine learning of streaming and distributed data. M-estimators are functions D(x,y) that can be written as psi(d(x,y)) where ({X}, d) is a true metric (i.e. 1-metric) space. Special cases of M-estimators include the well-known k-median (psi(x) =x) and k-means (psi(x) = x^2) functions. Our technique takes an existing offline construction for an M-estimator coreset and converts it into the streaming setting, where n data points arrive sequentially. To our knowledge, this is the first streaming construction for any M-estimator that does not rely on the merge-and-reduce tree. For example, our coreset for streaming metric k-means uses O(epsilon^{-2} k log k log n) points of storage. The previous state-of-the-art required storing at least O(epsilon^{-2} k log k log^{4} n) points

Improved Algorithms for Time Decay Streams

In the time-decay model for data streams, elements of an underlying data set arrive sequentially with the recently arrived elements being more important. A common approach for handling large data sets is to maintain a coreset, a succinct summary of the processed data that allows approximate recovery of a predetermined query. We provide a general framework that takes any offline-coreset and gives a time-decay coreset for polynomial time decay functions. We also consider the exponential time decay model for k-median clustering, where we provide a constant factor approximation algorithm that utilizes the online facility location algorithm. Our algorithm stores O(k log(h Delta)+h) points where h is the half-life of the decay function and Delta is the aspect ratio of the dataset. Our techniques extend to k-means clustering and M-estimators as well