Distributed estimation of principal eigenspaces

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Publication:2284361



Abstract: Principal component analysis (PCA) is fundamental to statistical machine learning. It extracts latent principal factors that contribute to the most variation of the data. When data are stored across multiple machines, however, communication cost can prohibit the computation of PCA in a central location and distributed algorithms for PCA are thus needed. This paper proposes and studies a distributed PCA algorithm: each node machine computes the top K eigenvectors and transmits them to the central server; the central server then aggregates the information from all the node machines and conducts a PCA based on the aggregated information. We investigate the bias and variance for the resulting distributed estimator of the top K eigenvectors. In particular, we show that for distributions with symmetric innovation, the empirical top eigenspaces are unbiased and hence the distributed PCA is "unbiased". We derive the rate of convergence for distributed PCA estimators, which depends explicitly on the effective rank of covariance, eigen-gap, and the number of machines. We show that when the number of machines is not unreasonably large, the distributed PCA performs as well as the whole sample PCA, even without full access of whole data. The theoretical results are verified by an extensive simulation study. We also extend our analysis to the heterogeneous case where the population covariance matrices are different across local machines but share similar top eigen-structures.


The authors deal with the problem of large data sets being scattered across distant places. Massive datasets are nowadays ubiquitous and interesting examples are motivating the authors, as the data recorded by IT companies from all around the world (which cannot be stored in a single data center) or health records that are scattered across many hospitals or countries. The fusion or aggregation of such data sets is extremely difficult due to communication cost, privacy, data security, ownerships and other factors. A typical approach is based on distributed statistical/regression methods that first calculate local statistics based on each subdataset and then combine all the subsample-based statistics to produce an aggregated statistic. Principal component analysis (PCA) as a tool in statistical machine learning deals in the recent literature with a certain sparsity on top eigenvectors imposed to overcome the noise accumulation. Distributed PCA needs to handle data that are partitioned and stored across multiple servers. The paper contains a distributed algorithm for estimating the top eigenvectors, the statistical error rates of the aggregated estimator and simulation results to validate the theories, under sub-Gaussian assumptions of the data (where the tails are dominated by the tails of a Gaussian). Further interesting research directions are mentioned, for instance to investigate the possibility to use heavy-tailed distributions (heavier tails than sub-Gaussian tails), when to establish statistical rate with exponential deviation require shrinkage of the data and the control of the induced bias.



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