arXiv2018
We study the problem of detecting outlier pairs of strongly correlated variables among a collection of $n$ variables with otherwise weak pairwise correlations. After normalization, this task amounts to the geometric task where we are given as input a set of $n$ vectors with unit Euclidean norm and dimension $d$, and for some constants $0<τ<ρ<1$, we are asked to find all the outlier pairs of vectors whose inner product is at least $ρ$ in absolute value, subject to the promise that all but at most $q$ pairs of vectors have inner product at most $τ$ in absolute value. Improving on an algorithm of G. Valiant [FOCS 2012; J. ACM 2015], we present a randomized algorithm that for Boolean inputs ($\{-1,1\}$-valued data normalized to unit Euclidean length) runs in time \[ \tilde O\bigl(n^{\max\,\{1-γ+M(Δγ,γ),\,M(1-γ,2Δγ)\}}+qdn^{2γ}\bigr)\,, \] where $0<γ<1$ is a constant tradeoff parameter and $M(μ,ν)$ is the exponent to multiply an $\lfloor n^μ\rfloor\times\lfloor n^ν\rfloor$ matrix with an $\lfloor n^ν\rfloor\times \lfloor n^μ\rfloor$ matrix and $Δ=1/(1-\log_τρ)$. As corollaries we obtain randomized algorithms that run in time \[ \tilde O\bigl(n^{\frac{2ω}{3-\log_τρ}}+qdn^{\frac{2(1-\log_τρ)}{3-\log_τρ}}\bigr) \] and in time \[ \tilde O\bigl(n^{\frac{4}{2+α(1-\log_τρ)}}+qdn^{\frac{2α(1-\log_τρ)}{2+α(1-\log_τρ)}}\bigr)\,, \] where $2\leqω<2.38$ is the exponent for square matrix multiplication and $0.3<α\leq 1$ is the exponent for rectangular matrix multiplication. The notation $\tilde O(\cdot)$ hides polylogarithmic factors in $n$ and $d$ whose degree may depend on $ρ$ and $τ$. We present further corollaries for the light bulb problem and for learning sparse Boolean functions.