A note on sparse least-squares regression

We compute a \emph{sparse} solution to the classical least-squares problem $\min_x||A x -b||,$ where $A$ is an arbitrary matrix. We describe a novel algorithm for this sparse least-squares problem. The algorithm operates as follows: first, it selects columns from $A$, and then solves a least-squares problem only with the selected columns. The column selection algorithm that we use is known to perform well for the well studied column subset selection problem. The contribution of this article is to show that it gives favorable results for sparse least-squares as well. Specifically, we prove that the solution vector obtained by our algorithm is close to the solution vector obtained via what is known as the "SVD-truncated regularization approach".Comment: Information Processing Letters, to appea

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

Optimal CUR Matrix Decompositions

The CUR decomposition of an $m \times n$ matrix $A$ finds an $m \times c$ matrix $C$ with a subset of $c < n$ columns of $A,$ together with an $r \times n$ matrix $R$ with a subset of $r < m$ rows of $A,$ as well as a $c \times r$ low-rank matrix $U$ such that the matrix $C U R$ approximates the matrix $A,$ that is, $|| A - CUR ||_F^2 \le (1+\epsilon) || A - A_k||_F^2$, where $||.||_F$ denotes the Frobenius norm and $A_k$ is the best $m \times n$ matrix of rank $k$ constructed via the SVD. We present input-sparsity-time and deterministic algorithms for constructing such a CUR decomposition where $c=O(k/\epsilon)$ and $r=O(k/\epsilon)$ and rank$(U) = k$. Up to constant factors, our algorithms are simultaneously optimal in $c, r,$ and rank$(U)$.Comment: small revision in lemma 4.