Fast approximation of orthogonal matrices and application to PCA

07/18/2019

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by   Cristian Rusu, et al.

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11

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We study the problem of approximating orthogonal matrices so that their application is numerically fast and yet accurate. We find an approximation by solving an optimization problem over a set of structured matrices, that we call Givens transformations, including Givens rotations as a special case. We propose an efficient greedy algorithm to solve such a problem and show that it strikes a balance between approximation accuracy and speed of computation. The proposed approach is relevant in spectral methods and we illustrate its application to PCA.