Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS 2009)
Sanjiv Kumar, Mehryar Mohri, Ameet Talwalkar
A crucial technique for scaling kernel methods to very large data sets reaching or exceeding millions of instances is based on low-rank approximation of kernel matrices. We introduce a new family of algorithms based on mixtures of Nystrom approximations, ensemble Nystrom algorithms, that yield more accurate low-rank approximations than the standard Nystrom method. We give a detailed study of multiple variants of these algorithms based on simple averaging, an exponential weight method, or regression-based methods. We also present a theoretical analysis of these algorithms, including novel error bounds guaranteeing a better convergence rate than the standard Nystrom method. Finally, we report the results of extensive experiments with several data sets containing up to 1M points demonstrating the significant performance improvements gained over the standard Nystrom approximation.