Sublinear Time Eigenvalue Approximation via Random Sampling

Understand

We study the problem of approximating the eigenspectrum of a symmetric matrix $\mathbf A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ with bounded entries (i.e., $\|\mathbf A\|_{\infty} \leq 1$).

• We present a simple sublinear time algorithm that approximates all eigenvalues of $\mathbf{A}$ up to additive error $\pm \epsilon n$ using those of a randomly sampled $\tilde {O}\left (\frac{\log^3 n}{\epsilon^3}\right ) \times \tilde O\left (\frac{\log^3 n}{\epsilon^3}\right )$ principal submatrix.
• Our result can be viewed as a concentration bound on the complete eigenspectrum of a random submatrix, significantly extending known bounds on just the singular values (the magnitudes of the eigenvalues).
• We give improved error bounds of $\pm \epsilon \sqrt{\text{nnz}(\mathbf{A})}$ and $\pm \epsilon \|\mathbf A\|_F$ when the rows of $\mathbf A$ can be sampled with probabilities proportional to their sparsities or their squared $\ell_2$ norms respectively.