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### Fast Randomized Kernel Methods With Statistical Guarantees

One approach to improving the running time of kernel-based machine learning methods is to build a small sketch of the input and use it in lieu of the full kernel matrix in the machine learning task of interest. Here, we describe a version of this approach that comes with running time guarantees as well as improved guarantees on its statistical performance. By extending the notion of \emph{statistical leverage scores} to the setting of kernel ridge regression, our main statistical result is to identify an importance sampling distribution that reduces the size of the sketch (i.e., the required number of columns to be sampled) to the \emph{effective dimensionality} of the problem. This quantity is often much smaller than previous bounds that depend on the \emph{maximal degrees of freedom}. Our main algorithmic result is to present a fast algorithm to compute approximations to these scores. This algorithm runs in time that is linear in the number of samples---more precisely, the running time is $O(np^2)$, where the parameter $p$ depends only on the trace of the kernel matrix and the regularization parameter---and it can be applied to the matrix of feature vectors, without having to form the full kernel matrix. This is obtained via a variant of length-squared sampling that we adapt to the kernel setting in a way that is of independent interest. Lastly, we provide empirical results illustrating our theory, and we discuss how this new notion of the statistical leverage of a data point captures in a fine way the difficulty of the original statistical learning problem.

### Recursive Sampling for the Nystrom Method

We give the first algorithm for kernel Nystrom approximation that runs in linear time in the number of training points and is provably accurate for all kernel matrices, without dependence on regularity or incoherence conditions. The algorithm projects the kernel onto a set of s landmark points sampled by their ridge leverage scores, requiring just O(ns) kernel evaluations and O(ns^2) additional runtime. While leverage score sampling has long been known to give strong theoretical guarantees for Nystrom approximation, by employing a fast recursive sampling scheme, our algorithm is the first to make the approach scalable. Empirically we show that it finds more accurate kernel approximations in less time than popular techniques such as classic Nystrom approximation and the random Fourier features method.

### Recursive Sampling for the Nystr\"om Method

We give the first algorithm for kernel Nystr\"om approximation that runs in *linear time in the number of training points* and is provably accurate for all kernel matrices, without dependence on regularity or incoherence conditions. The algorithm projects the kernel onto a set of $s$ landmark points sampled by their *ridge leverage scores*, requiring just $O(ns)$ kernel evaluations and $O(ns^2)$ additional runtime. While leverage score sampling has long been known to give strong theoretical guarantees for Nystr\"om approximation, by employing a fast recursive sampling scheme, our algorithm is the first to make the approach scalable. Empirically we show that it finds more accurate, lower rank kernel approximations in less time than popular techniques such as uniformly sampled Nystr\"om approximation and the random Fourier features method.

### Randomized Clustered Nystrom for Large-Scale Kernel Machines

The Nystrom method is a popular technique for generating low-rank approximations of kernel matrices that arise in many machine learning problems. The approximation quality of the Nystrom method depends crucially on the number of selected landmark points and the selection procedure. In this paper, we introduce a randomized algorithm for generating landmark points that is scalable to large high-dimensional data sets. The proposed method performs K-means clustering on low-dimensional random projections of a data set and thus leads to significant savings for high-dimensional data sets. Our theoretical results characterize the tradeoffs between accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. Moreover, numerical experiments on classification and regression tasks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our proposed method compared with existing approaches.

### Ridge Regression and Provable Deterministic Ridge Leverage Score Sampling

Ridge leverage scores provide a balance between low-rank approximation and regularization, and are ubiquitous in randomized linear algebra and machine learning. Deterministic algorithms are also of interest in the moderately big data regime, because deterministic algorithms provide interpretability to the practitioner by having no failure probability and always returning the same results. We provide provable guarantees for deterministic column sampling using ridge leverage scores. The matrix sketch returned by our algorithm is a column subset of the original matrix, yielding additional interpretability. Like the randomized counterparts, the deterministic algorithm provides $(1+\epsilon)$ error column subset selection, $(1+\epsilon)$ error projection-cost preservation, and an additive-multiplicative spectral bound. We also show that under the assumption of power-law decay of ridge leverage scores, this deterministic algorithm is provably as accurate as randomized algorithms. Lastly, ridge regression is frequently used to regularize ill-posed linear least-squares problems. While ridge regression provides shrinkage for the regression coefficients, many of the coefficients remain small but non-zero. Performing ridge regression with the matrix sketch returned by our algorithm and a particular regularization parameter forces coefficients to zero and has a provable $(1+\epsilon)$ bound on the statistical risk. As such, it is an interesting alternative to elastic net regularization.