CUR Low Rank Approximation of a Matrix at Sublinear Cost

Abstract

Low rank approximation of a matrix (hereafter LRA) is a highly important area of Numerical Linear and Multilinear Algebra and Data Mining and Analysis. One can operate with an LRA at sublinear cost -- by using much fewer memory cells and flops than an input matrix M has entries. For worst case inputs one cannot compute even a reasonably close LRA at sublinear cost, but in computational practice accurate LRAs, even in their memory efficient form of CUR LRAs, are routinely obtained at sublinear cost for large and important classes of matrices, in particular by means of Cross-Approximation iterations, which specialize Alternating Direction techniques to LRA. We identify some classes of matrices for which CUR LRA are computed at sublinear cost as well as some sublinear cost LRA algorithms that are empirically accurate for large classes of inputs. Some of our techniques and concepts can be of independent interests.