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).