Reviews: Dimensionality Reduction of Massive Sparse Datasets Using Coresets

Neural Information Processing Systems 

This paper makes some pretty critical mistakes regarding previous work. For one, they cite [8], but they should in fact be citing Cohen et al. "Dimensionality Reduction for k-Means Clustering and Low Rank Approximation" This is not just a typo - the authors go on to state a result of [8] about operator norm rather than the result of the Cohen et al. paper - namely, the Cohen et al. paper achieves O(k/eps 2) rescaled columns deterministically for exactly the same problem considered in this submission - see part 5 of Lemma 11 and section 7.3 based on BSS. This is much stronger than the O(k 2/eps 2) rescaled columns achieved in the submission. This directly contradicts their sentence "Our main result is the first algorithm for computing an (k,eps)-coreset C of size independent of both n and d". The authors also say later [8,7] minimize the 2-norm - [8] is the wrong reference again!