Near Optimal Linear Algebra in the Online and Sliding Window Models

Abstract: We initiate the study of numerical linear algebra in the sliding window model, where only the most recent $W$ updates in a stream form the underlying data set. We first introduce a unified row-sampling based framework that gives randomized algorithms for spectral approximation, low-rank approximation/projection-cost preservation, and $\ell_1$-subspace embeddings in the sliding window model, which often use nearly optimal space and achieve nearly input sparsity runtime. Our algorithms are based on "reverse online" versions of offline sampling distributions such as (ridge) leverage scores, $\ell_1$ sensitivities, and Lewis weights to quantify both the importance and the recency of a row. Our row-sampling framework rather surprisingly implies connections to the well-studied online model; our structural results also give the first sample optimal (up to lower order terms) online algorithm for low-rank approximation/projection-cost preservation. Using this powerful primitive, we give online algorithms for column/row subset selection and principal component analysis that resolves the main open question of Bhaskara et. al.,(FOCS 2019). We also give the first online algorithm for $\ell_1$-subspace embeddings. We further formalize the connection between the online model and the sliding window model by introducing an additional unified framework for deterministic algorithms using a merge and reduce paradigm and the concept of online coresets. Our sampling based algorithms in the row-arrival online model yield online coresets, giving deterministic algorithms for spectral approximation, low-rank approximation/projection-cost preservation, and $\ell_1$-subspace embeddings in the sliding window model that use nearly optimal space.