Nikolaos Freris

Anastasios Zouzias, Nikolaos Freris

We present a randomized iterative algorithm that exponentially converges in expectation to the minimum Euclidean norm least squares solution of a given linear system of equations. The expected number of arithmetic operations required to obtain an estimate of given accuracy is proportional to the square condition number of the system multiplied by the number of non-zeros entries of the input matrix. The proposed algorithm is an extension of the randomized Kaczmarz method that was analyzed by Strohmer and Vershynin.

Michail Vlachos, Nikolaos Freris, Anastasios Kyrillidis

Real-world data typically contain repeated and periodic patterns. This suggests that they can be effectively represented and compressed using only a few coefficients of an appropriate basis (e.g., Fourier, Wavelets, etc.). However, distance estimation when the data are represented using different sets of coefficients is still a largely unexplored area. This work studies the optimization problems related to obtaining the \emph{tightest} lower/upper bound on Euclidean distances when each data object is potentially compressed using a different set of orthonormal coefficients. Our technique leads to tighter distance estimates, which translates into more accurate search, learning and mining operations \textit{directly} in the compressed domain. We formulate the problem of estimating lower/upper distance bounds as an optimization problem. We establish the properties of optimal solutions, and leverage the theoretical analysis to develop a fast algorithm to obtain an \emph{exact} solution to the problem. The suggested solution provides the tightest estimation of the $L_2$-norm or the correlation. We show that typical data-analysis operations, such as k-NN search or k-Means clustering, can operate more accurately using the proposed compression and distance reconstruction technique. We compare it with many other prevalent compression and reconstruction techniques, including random projections and PCA-based techniques. We highlight a surprising result, namely that when the data are highly sparse in some basis, our technique may even outperform PCA-based compression. The contributions of this work are generic as our methodology is applicable to any sequential or high-dimensional data as well as to any orthogonal data transformation used for the underlying data compression scheme.