arXiv subjects

Christopher Musco

Publications and source records attributed to Christopher Musco.

76 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Randomized Block Krylov Methods for Stronger and Faster Approximate Singular Value Decomposition

Since being analyzed by Rokhlin, Szlam, and Tygert and popularized by Halko, Martinsson, and Tropp, randomized Simultaneous Power Iteration has become the method of choice for approximate singular value decomposition. It is more accurate than simpler sketching algorithms, yet still converges quickly for any matrix, independently of singular value gaps. After $\tilde{O}(1/ε)$ iterations, it gives a low-rank approximation within $(1+ε)$ of optimal for spectral norm error. We give the first provable runtime improvement on Simultaneous Iteration: a simple randomized block Krylov method, closely related to the classic Block Lanczos algorithm, gives the same guarantees in just $\tilde{O}(1/\sqrtε)$ iterations and performs substantially better experimentally. Despite their long history, our analysis is the first of a Krylov subspace method that does not depend on singular value gaps, which are unreliable in practice. Furthermore, while it is a simple accuracy benchmark, even $(1+ε)$ error for spectral norm low-rank approximation does not imply that an algorithm returns high quality principal components, a major issue for data applications. We address this problem for the first time by showing that both Block Krylov Iteration and a minor modification of Simultaneous Iteration give nearly optimal PCA for any matrix. This result further justifies their strength over non-iterative sketching methods. Finally, we give insight beyond the worst case, justifying why both algorithms can run much faster in practice than predicted. We clarify how simple techniques can take advantage of common matrix properties to significantly improve runtime.

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arXiv2015

Single Pass Spectral Sparsification in Dynamic Streams

We present the first single pass algorithm for computing spectral sparsifiers of graphs in the dynamic semi-streaming model. Given a single pass over a stream containing insertions and deletions of edges to a graph G, our algorithm maintains a randomized linear sketch of the incidence matrix of G into dimension O((1/epsilon^2) n polylog(n)). Using this sketch, at any point, the algorithm can output a (1 +/- epsilon) spectral sparsifier for G with high probability. While O((1/epsilon^2) n polylog(n)) space algorithms are known for computing "cut sparsifiers" in dynamic streams [AGM12b, GKP12] and spectral sparsifiers in "insertion-only" streams [KL11], prior to our work, the best known single pass algorithm for maintaining spectral sparsifiers in dynamic streams required sketches of dimension Omega((1/epsilon^2) n^(5/3)) [AGM14]. To achieve our result, we show that, using a coarse sparsifier of G and a linear sketch of G's incidence matrix, it is possible to sample edges by effective resistance, obtaining a spectral sparsifier of arbitrary precision. Sampling from the sketch requires a novel application of ell_2/ell_2 sparse recovery, a natural extension of the ell_0 methods used for cut sparsifiers in [AGM12b]. Recent work of [MP12] on row sampling for matrix approximation gives a recursive approach for obtaining the required coarse sparsifiers. Under certain restrictions, our approach also extends to the problem of maintaining a spectral approximation for a general matrix A^T A given a stream of updates to rows in A.

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arXiv2015

Dimensionality Reduction for k-Means Clustering and Low Rank Approximation

We show how to approximate a data matrix $\mathbf{A}$ with a much smaller sketch $\mathbf{\tilde A}$ that can be used to solve a general class of constrained k-rank approximation problems to within $(1+ε)$ error. Importantly, this class of problems includes $k$-means clustering and unconstrained low rank approximation (i.e. principal component analysis). By reducing data points to just $O(k)$ dimensions, our methods generically accelerate any exact, approximate, or heuristic algorithm for these ubiquitous problems. For $k$-means dimensionality reduction, we provide $(1+ε)$ relative error results for many common sketching techniques, including random row projection, column selection, and approximate SVD. For approximate principal component analysis, we give a simple alternative to known algorithms that has applications in the streaming setting. Additionally, we extend recent work on column-based matrix reconstruction, giving column subsets that not only `cover' a good subspace for $\bv{A}$, but can be used directly to compute this subspace. Finally, for $k$-means clustering, we show how to achieve a $(9+ε)$ approximation by Johnson-Lindenstrauss projecting data points to just $O(\log k/ε^2)$ dimensions. This gives the first result that leverages the specific structure of $k$-means to achieve dimension independent of input size and sublinear in $k$.

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arXiv2014

Uniform Sampling for Matrix Approximation

Random sampling has become a critical tool in solving massive matrix problems. For linear regression, a small, manageable set of data rows can be randomly selected to approximate a tall, skinny data matrix, improving processing time significantly. For theoretical performance guarantees, each row must be sampled with probability proportional to its statistical leverage score. Unfortunately, leverage scores are difficult to compute. A simple alternative is to sample rows uniformly at random. While this often works, uniform sampling will eliminate critical row information for many natural instances. We take a fresh look at uniform sampling by examining what information it does preserve. Specifically, we show that uniform sampling yields a matrix that, in some sense, well approximates a large fraction of the original. While this weak form of approximation is not enough for solving linear regression directly, it is enough to compute a better approximation. This observation leads to simple iterative row sampling algorithms for matrix approximation that run in input-sparsity time and preserve row structure and sparsity at all intermediate steps. In addition to an improved understanding of uniform sampling, our main proof introduces a structural result of independent interest: we show that every matrix can be made to have low coherence by reweighting a small subset of its rows.

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