The Singular Value Decomposition is a key operation in many machine learning methods. Its computational cost, however, makes it unscalable and impractical for the massive-sized datasets becoming common in applications. We present a new method, QUIC-SVD, for fast approximation of the full SVD with automatic sample size minimization and empirical relative error control. Previous Monte Carlo approaches have not addressed the full SVD nor benefited from the efficiency of automatic, empirically-driven sample sizing. Our empirical tests show speedups of several orders of magnitude over exact SVD. Such scalability should enable QUIC-SVD to meet the needs of a wide array of methods and applications.

The Singular Value Decomposition is a key operation in many machine learning methods. Its computational cost, however, makes it unscalable and impractical for the massive-sized datasets becoming common in applications. We present a new method, QUIC-SVD, for fast approximation of the full SVD with automatic sample size minimization and empirical relative error control. Previous Monte Carlo approaches have not addressed the full SVD nor benefited from the efficiency of automatic, empirically-driven sample sizing. Our empirical tests show speedups of several orders of magnitude over exact SVD.