High-performance Kernel Machines with Implicit Distributed Optimization and Randomization

In order to fully utilize "big data", it is often required to use "big models". Such models tend to grow with the complexity and size of the training data, and do not make strong parametric assumptions upfront on the nature of the underlying statistical dependencies. Kernel methods fit this need well, as they constitute a versatile and principled statistical methodology for solving a wide range of non-parametric modelling problems. However, their high computational costs (in storage and time) pose a significant barrier to their widespread adoption in big data applications. We propose an algorithmic framework and high-performance implementation for massive-scale training of kernel-based statistical models, based on combining two key technical ingredients: (i) distributed general purpose convex optimization, and (ii) the use of randomization to improve the scalability of kernel methods. Our approach is based on a block-splitting variant of the Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers, carefully reconfigured to handle very large random feature matrices, while exploiting hybrid parallelism typically found in modern clusters of multicore machines. Our implementation supports a variety of statistical learning tasks by enabling several loss functions, regularization schemes, kernels, and layers of randomized approximations for both dense and sparse datasets, in a highly extensible framework. We evaluate the ability of our framework to learn models on data from applications, and provide a comparison against existing sequential and parallel libraries.Comment: Work presented at MMDS 2014 (June 2014) and JSM 201

Randomized Riemannian Preconditioning for Orthogonality Constrained Problems

Optimization problems with (generalized) orthogonality constraints are prevalent across science and engineering. For example, in computational science they arise in the symmetric (generalized) eigenvalue problem, in nonlinear eigenvalue problems, and in electronic structures computations, to name a few problems. In statistics and machine learning, they arise, for example, in canonical correlation analysis and in linear discriminant analysis. In this article, we consider using randomized preconditioning in the context of optimization problems with generalized orthogonality constraints. Our proposed algorithms are based on Riemannian optimization on the generalized Stiefel manifold equipped with a non-standard preconditioned geometry, which necessitates development of the geometric components necessary for developing algorithms based on this approach. Furthermore, we perform asymptotic convergence analysis of the preconditioned algorithms which help to characterize the quality of a given preconditioner using second-order information. Finally, for the problems of canonical correlation analysis and linear discriminant analysis, we develop randomized preconditioners along with corresponding bounds on the relevant condition number

Polynomial Tensor Sketch for Element-wise Function of Low-Rank Matrix

This paper studies how to sketch element-wise functions of low-rank matrices. Formally, given low-rank matrix A = [Aij] and scalar non-linear function f, we aim for finding an approximated low-rank representation of the (possibly high-rank) matrix [f(Aij)]. To this end, we propose an efficient sketching-based algorithm whose complexity is significantly lower than the number of entries of A, i.e., it runs without accessing all entries of [f(Aij)] explicitly. The main idea underlying our method is to combine a polynomial approximation of f with the existing tensor sketch scheme for approximating monomials of entries of A. To balance the errors of the two approximation components in an optimal manner, we propose a novel regression formula to find polynomial coefficients given A and f. In particular, we utilize a coreset-based regression with a rigorous approximation guarantee. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability and superiority of the proposed scheme under various machine learning tasks