Fast Summation of Radial Kernels via QMC Slicing

Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2025 (ICLR 2025) Conference

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Johannes Hertrich, Tim Jahn, Michael Quellmalz

Abstract

The fast computation of large kernel sums is a challenging task, which arises as a subproblem in any kernel method. We approach the problem by slicing, which relies on random projections to one-dimensional subspaces and fast Fourier summation. We prove bounds for the slicing error and propose a quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) approach for selecting the projections based on spherical quadrature rules. Numerical examples demonstrate that our QMC-slicing approach significantly outperforms existing methods like (QMC-)random Fourier features, orthogonal Fourier features or non-QMC slicing on standard test datasets.