An Improved Frequent Directions Algorithm for Low-Rank Approximation via Block Krylov Iteration

Frequent directions (FDs), as a deterministic matrix sketching technique, have been proposed for tackling low-rank approximation problems. This method has a high degree of accuracy and practicality but experiences a lot of computational cost for large-scale data. Several recent works on the randomized version of FDs greatly improve the computational efficiency but unfortunately sacrifice some precision. To remedy such an issue, this article aims to find a more accurate projection subspace to further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the existing FDs’ techniques. Specifically, by utilizing the power of the block Krylov iteration and random projection technique, this article presents a fast and accurate FDs algorithm named r-BKIFD. The rigorous theoretical analysis shows that the proposed r-BKIFD has a comparable error bound with original FDs, and the approximation error can be arbitrarily small when the number of iterations is chosen appropriately. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real data further demonstrate the superiority of r-BKIFD over several popular FDs algorithms both in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy.