The Fast Cauchy Transform and faster robust linear regression

We provide fast algorithms for overconstrained `p regression and related problems: for an n × d input matrix A and vector b ∈ Rn, in O(nd log n) time we reduce the problem minx∈Rd ‖Ax − b‖p to the same problem with input matrix A ̃ of dimension s × d and corresponding b ̃ of dimension s × 1. Here, A ̃ and b ̃ are a coreset for the problem, consisting of sampled and rescaled rows of A and b; and s is independent of n and polynomial in d. Our results improve on the best previous algorithms when n d, for all p ∈ [1,∞) except p = 2; in particular, they improve the O(nd1.376+) running time of Sohler and Woodruff (STOC, 2011) for p = 1, that uses asymptot-ically fast matrix multiplication, and the O(nd5 log n) time of Dasgupta et al. (SICOMP, 2009) for general p, that uses ellipsoidal rounding. We also provide a suite of improved results for find-ing well-conditioned bases via ellipsoidal rounding, illustrating tradeoffs between running time and conditioning quality, including a one-pass conditioning algorithm for general `p problems. To complement this theory, we provide a detailed empirical evaluation of implementations of our algorithms for p = 1, comparing them with several related algorithms. Among other things, our empirical results clearly show that, in the asymptotic regime, the theory is a very good guide to the practical performance of these algorithms. Our algorithms use our faster constructions of well-conditioned bases for `p spaces and, for p = 1, a fast subspace embedding of independent interest that we call the Fast Cauchy Transform: a distribution over matrices Π: Rn 7 → RO(d log d), found obliviously to A, that approximately preserves the `1 norms: that is, with large probability, simultaneously for all x, ‖Ax‖1 ≈ ‖ΠAx‖1, with distortion O(d2+η), for an arbitrarily small constant η> 0; and, moreover, ΠA can be computed in O(nd log d) time. The techniques underlying our Fast Cauchy Transform include fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss transforms, low-coherence matrices, and rescaling by Cauchy random variables.