Deterministic algorithms for skewed matrix products

TL;DR

This paper introduces new deterministic algorithms for approximating skewed matrix products, improving efficiency and guarantees over previous randomized methods, especially in data mining applications with sparse or skewed data.

Contribution

The paper presents the first deterministic algorithms for approximating matrix products, with improved efficiency for skewed matrices and a novel group testing approach for detecting large entries.

Findings

Deterministic approximation of matrix entries within an additive error proportional to the entrywise 1-norm.

Enhanced efficiency for skewed matrices compared to randomized algorithms.

First deterministic algorithm with sub-quadratic time for matrices with few nonzero entries.

Abstract

Recently, Pagh presented a randomized approximation algorithm for the multiplication of real-valued matrices building upon work for detecting the most frequent items in data streams. We continue this line of research and present new {\em deterministic} matrix multiplication algorithms. Motivated by applications in data mining, we first consider the case of real-valued, nonnegative $n$-by-$n$ input matrices $A$ and $B$, and show how to obtain a deterministic approximation of the weights of individual entries, as well as the entrywise $p$-norm, of the product $AB$. The algorithm is simple, space efficient and runs in one pass over the input matrices. For a user defined $b \in (0, n^2)$ the algorithm runs in time $O(nb + n\cdot\text{Sort}(n))$ and space $O(n + b)$ and returns an approximation of the entries of $AB$ within an additive factor of $\|AB\|_{E1}/b$, where $\|C\|_{E1} = \sum_{i, j} |C_{ij}|$ is the entrywise 1-norm of a matrix $C$ and $\text{Sort}(n)$ is the time required to sort $n$ real numbers in linear space. Building upon a result by Berinde et al. we show that for skewed matrix products (a common situation in many real-life applications) the algorithm is more efficient and achieves better approximation guarantees than previously known randomized algorithms. When the input matrices are not restricted to nonnegative entries, we present a new deterministic group testing algorithm detecting nonzero entries in the matrix product with large absolute value. The algorithm is clearly outperformed by randomized matrix multiplication algorithms, but as a byproduct we obtain the first $O(n^{2 + \varepsilon})$-time deterministic algorithm for matrix products with $O(\sqrt{n})$ nonzero entries.