Toward a unified theory of sparse dimensionality reduction in Euclidean space
This provides a theoretical foundation for sparse dimensionality reduction, impacting fields like compressed sensing and numerical linear algebra, but it is incremental as it extends existing dense results to sparse settings.
The paper tackles the problem of determining conditions for sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transforms to preserve norms uniformly over sets in Euclidean space, showing that it suffices to choose parameters based on a new geometric complexity measure, leading to a sparse analog of Gordon's theorem.
Let $Φ\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ be a sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform [KN14] with $s$ non-zeroes per column. For a subset $T$ of the unit sphere, $\varepsilon\in(0,1/2)$ given, we study settings for $m,s$ required to ensure $$ \mathop{\mathbb{E}}_Φ\sup_{x\in T} \left|\|Φx\|_2^2 - 1 \right| < \varepsilon , $$ i.e. so that $Φ$ preserves the norm of every $x\in T$ simultaneously and multiplicatively up to $1+\varepsilon$. We introduce a new complexity parameter, which depends on the geometry of $T$, and show that it suffices to choose $s$ and $m$ such that this parameter is small. Our result is a sparse analog of Gordon's theorem, which was concerned with a dense $Φ$ having i.i.d. Gaussian entries. We qualitatively unify several results related to the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, subspace embeddings, and Fourier-based restricted isometries. Our work also implies new results in using the sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform in numerical linear algebra, classical and model-based compressed sensing, manifold learning, and constrained least squares problems such as the Lasso.