Kernel methods are an extremely popular set of techniques used for many important machine learning and data analysis applications. In addition to having good practical performances, these methods are supported by a well-developed theory. Kernel methods use an implicit mapping of the input data into a high dimensional feature space defined by a kernel function, i.e., a function returning the inner product between the images of two data points in the feature space. Central to any kernel method is the kernel matrix, which is built by evaluating the kernel function on a given sample dataset. In this paper, we initiate the study of non-asymptotic spectral theory of random kernel matrices. These are n x n random matrices whose (i,j)th entry is obtained by evaluating the kernel function on @math and @math , where @math are a set of n independent random high-dimensional vectors. Our main contribution is to obtain tight upper bounds on the spectral norm (largest eigenvalue) of random kernel matrices constructed by commonly used kernel functions based on polynomials and Gaussian radial basis. As an application of these results, we provide lower bounds on the distortion needed for releasing the coefficients of kernel ridge regression under attribute privacy, a general privacy notion which captures a large class of privacy definitions. Kernel ridge regression is standard method for performing non-parametric regression that regularly outperforms traditional regression approaches in various domains. Our privacy distortion lower bounds are the first for any kernel technique, and our analysis assumes realistic scenarios for the input, unlike all previous lower bounds for other release problems which only hold under very restrictive input settings.
Like the development of non-asymptotic theory of traditional random matrices has found multitude of applications in areas including statistics, geometric functional analysis, and compressed sensing @cite_13 , we believe that the growth of a non-asymptotic theory of random kernel matrices will help in better understanding of many machine learning applications that utilize kernel techniques.
@cite_13
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The classical random matrix theory is mostly focused on asymptotic spectral properties of random matrices as their dimensions grow to infinity. At the same time many recent applications from convex geometry to functional analysis to information theory operate with random matrices in fixed dimensions. This survey addresses the non-asymptotic theory of extreme singular values of random matrices with independent entries. We focus on recently developed geometric methods for estimating the hard edge of random matrices (the smallest singular value). This is a tutorial on some basic non-asymptotic methods and concepts in random matrix theory. The reader will learn several tools for the analysis of the extreme singular values of random matrices with independent rows or columns. Many of these methods sprung off from the development of geometric functional analysis since the 1970's. They have applications in several fields, most notably in theoretical computer science, statistics and signal processing. A few basic applications are covered in this text, particularly for the problem of estimating covariance matrices in statistics and for validating probabilistic constructions of measurement matrices in compressed sensing. These notes are written particularly for graduate students and beginning researchers in different areas, including functional analysts, probabilists, theoretical statisticians, electrical engineers, and theoretical computer scientists. In the last few years, the asymptotic distribution of the singular values of certain random matrices has emerged as a key tool in the analysis and design of wireless communication channels. These channels are characterized by random matrices that admit various statistical descriptions depending on the actual application. The goal of this paper is the investigation and application of random matrix theory with particular emphasis on the asymptotic theorems on the distribution of the squared singular values under various assumption on the joint distribution of the random matrix entries. A fundamental result of free probability theory due to Voiculescu and subsequently refined by many authors states that conjugation by independent Haar-distributed random unitary matrices delivers asymptotic freeness. In this paper we exhibit many other systems of random unitary matrices that, when used for conjugation, lead to freeness. We do so by first proving a general result asserting “asymptotic liberation” under quite mild conditions, and then we explain how to specialize these general results in a striking way by exploiting Hadamard matrices. In particular, we recover and generalize results of the second-named author and of Tulino, Caire, Shamai and Verdu.