One popular method for dealing with large-scale data sets is sampling. For example, by using the empirical statistical leverage scores as an importance sampling distribution, the method of algorithmic leveraging samples and rescales rows columns of data matrices to reduce the data size before performing computations on the subproblem. This method has been successful in improving computational efficiency of algorithms for matrix problems such as least-squares approximation, least absolute deviations approximation, and low-rank matrix approximation. Existing work has focused on algorithmic issues such as worst-case running times and numerical issues associated with providing high-quality implementations, but none of it addresses statistical aspects of this method. In this paper, we provide a simple yet effective framework to evaluate the statistical properties of algorithmic leveraging in the context of estimating parameters in a linear regression model with a fixed number of predictors. We show that from the statistical perspective of bias and variance, neither leverage-based sampling nor uniform sampling dominates the other. This result is particularly striking, given the well-known result that, from the algorithmic perspective of worst-case analysis, leverage-based sampling provides uniformly superior worst-case algorithmic results, when compared with uniform sampling. Based on these theoretical results, we propose and analyze two new leveraging algorithms. A detailed empirical evaluation of existing leverage-based methods as well as these two new methods is carried out on both synthetic and real data sets. The empirical results indicate that our theory is a good predictor of practical performance of existing and new leverage-based algorithms and that the new algorithms achieve improved performance.
The running time of the relative-error approximation algorithm of @cite_1 depends on the time needed to premultiply @math by a randomized Hadamard transform (i.e., a structured'' random projection). Recently, high-quality numerical implementations of such random projections have been provided; see, e.g., Blendenpik @cite_28 , as well as LSRN @cite_5 , which extends these implementations to large-scale parallel environments. These implementations demonstrate that, for matrices as small as several thousand by several hundred, leverage-based algorithms such as LEV and SLEV can be better in terms of running time than the computation of QR decompositions or the SVD with, e.g., . See @cite_28 @cite_5 for details, and see @cite_34 for the application of these methods to the fast computation of leverage scores. Below, we will evaluate an implementation of a variant of the main algorithm of @cite_1 in the software environment R.
@cite_28 @cite_5 @cite_34 @cite_1
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We describe a parallel iterative least squares solver named LSRN that is based on random normal projection. LSRN computes the min-length solution to @math , where @math with @math or @math , and where @math may be rank-deficient. Tikhonov regularization may also be included. Since @math is only involved in matrix-matrix and matrix-vector multiplications, it can be a dense or sparse matrix or a linear operator, and LSRN automatically speeds up when @math is sparse or a fast linear operator. The preconditioning phase consists of a random normal projection, which is embarrassingly parallel, and a singular value decomposition of size @math , where @math is moderately larger than 1, e.g., @math . We prove that the preconditioned system is well-conditioned, with a strong concentration result on the extreme singular values, and hence that the number of iterations is fully predictable when we apply LSQR or the Chebyshev semi-iterative method. As we demonstrate, the Chebyshev method is particularly efficient for solving large problems on clusters with high communication cost. Numerical results demonstrate that on a shared-memory machine, LSRN outperforms LAPACK's DGELSD on large dense problems, and MATLAB's backslash (SuiteSparseQR) on sparse problems. Further experiments demonstrate that LSRN scales well on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud cluster. 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. The statistical leverage scores of a matrix A are the squared row-norms of the matrix containing its (top) left singular vectors and the coherence is the largest leverage score. These quantities are of interest in recently-popular problems such as matrix completion and Nystrom-based low-rank matrix approximation as well as in large-scale statistical data analysis applications more generally; moreover, they are of interest since they define the key structural nonuniformity that must be dealt with in developing fast randomized matrix algorithms. Our main result is a randomized algorithm that takes as input an arbitrary n × d matrix A, with n ≫ d, and that returns as output relative-error approximations to all n of the statistical leverage scores. The proposed algorithm runs (under assumptions on the precise values of n and d) in O(nd logn) time, as opposed to the O(nd2) time required by the naive algorithm that involves computing an orthogonal basis for the range of A. Our analysis may be viewed in terms of computing a relative-error approximation to an underconstrained least-squares approximation problem, or, relatedly, it may be viewed as an application of Johnson-Lindenstrauss type ideas. Several practically-important extensions of our basic result are also described, including the approximation of so-called cross-leverage scores, the extension of these ideas to matrices with n ≈ d, and the extension to streaming environments.