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Local Random Feature Approximations of the Gaussian Kernel

2022/04/12 by Jonas Wacker, Wacker, Jonas, Maurizio Filippone +1
Computer Science · #Computation (stat.CO) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Machine Learning and Data Classification

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.05667

openalex publication_date 2022/04/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

A fundamental drawback of kernel-based statistical models is their limited scalability to large data sets, which requires resorting to approximations. In this work, we focus on the popular Gaussian kernel and on techniques to linearize kernel-based models by means of random feature approximations. In particular, we do so by studying a less explored random feature approximation based on Maclaurin expansions and polynomial sketches. We show that such approaches yield poor results when modelling high-frequency data, and we propose a novel localization scheme that improves kernel approximations and downstream performance significantly in this regime. We demonstrate these gains on a number of experiments involving the application of Gaussian process regression to synthetic and real-world data of different data sizes and dimensions.

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