Abstract

matrix A. It is often of interest to nd a low-rank approximation to A, i.e., an approximation D to the matrix A of rank not greater than a speci ed rank k, where k is much smaller than m and n. Methods such as the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) may be used to nd an approximation to A which is the best in a well de ned sense. These methods require memory and time which are superlinear in m and n; for many applications in which the data sets are very large this is prohibitive. Two simple and intuitive algorithms are presented which, when given an m n matrix A, compute a description of a low-rank approximation D to A, and which are qualitatively faster than the SVD. Both algorithms have provable bounds for the error matrix A D . For any matrix X , let kXk and kXk 2 denote its Frobenius norm and its spectral norm, respectively. In the rst algorithm, c = O(1) columns of A are randomly chosen. If the m c matrix C consists of those c columns of A (after appropriate rescaling) then it is shown that from C C approximations to the top singular values and corresponding singular vectors may be computed. From the computed singular vectors a description D of the matrix A may be computed such that rank(D ) k and such that holds with high probability for both = 2; F . This algorithm may be implemented without storing the matrix A in Random Access Memory (RAM), provided it can make two passes over the matrix stored in external memory and use O(m + n) additional RAM memory. The second algorithm is similar except that it further approximates the matrix C by randomly sampling r = O(1) rows of C to form a r c matrix W . Thus, it has additional error, but it can be implemented in three passes over the matrix using only constant ...

Citations