Smoothness of Schatten Norms and Sliding-Window Matrix Streams

Abstract: Large matrices are often accessed as a row-order stream. We consider the setting where rows are time-sensitive (i.e. they expire), which can be described by the sliding-window row-order model, and provide the first $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation of Schatten $p$-norms in this setting. Our main technical contribution is a proof that Schatten $p$-norms in row-order streams are smooth, and thus fit the smooth-histograms technique of Braverman and Ostrovsky (FOCS 2007) for sliding-window streams.