Post-Processing of High-Dimensional Data

Abstract: Scientific computations or measurements may result in huge volumes of data. Often these can be thought of representing a real-valued function on a high-dimensional domain, and can be conceptually arranged in the format of a tensor of high degree in some truncated or lossy compressed format. We look at some common post-processing tasks which are not obvious in the compressed format, as such huge data sets can not be stored in their entirety, and the value of an element is not readily accessible through simple look-up. The tasks we consider are finding the location of maximum or minimum, or minimum and maximum of a function of the data, or finding the indices of all elements in some interval --- i.e. level sets, the number of elements with a value in such a level set, the probability of an element being in a particular level set, and the mean and variance of the total collection. The algorithms to be described are fixed point iterations of particular functions of the tensor, which will then exhibit the desired result. For this, the data is considered as an element of a high degree tensor space, although in an abstract sense, the algorithms are independent of the representation of the data as a tensor. All that we require is that the data can be considered as an element of an associative, commutative algebra with an inner product. Such an algebra is isomorphic to a commutative sub-algebra of the usual matrix algebra, allowing the use of matrix algorithms to accomplish the mentioned tasks. We allow the actual computational representation to be a lossy compression, and we allow the algebra operations to be performed in an approximate fashion, so as to maintain a high compression level. One such example which we address explicitly is the representation of data as a tensor with compression in the form of a low-rank representation.