15-859: Algorithms for Big Data, Fall 2017

Instructor: David Woodruff
Lecture time: Thursdays, 15:00-17:30 (15:00-16:10, break till 16:20, 16:20-17:30), GHC 4303.
TA: Dhivya Eswaran
David's office hours: Mondays, 13:00-14:00 in GHC 7217 or by appointment.
Dhivya's recitation: Fridays, 10:30-11:20 in Baker Hall 235A
Dhivya's office hours: Wednesdays, 10:00-11:00 in GHC 6008 or by appointment.


Grading Latex Course Description    Lectures    Recitations    Problem sets    References   

Grading

Grading is based on problem sets, scribing a lecture, and a presentation/project. There will be no exams. General information about the breakdown for the grading is available here: grading.pdf

Latex

Homework solutions, scribe notes, and final projects must be typeset in LaTeX. If you are not familiar with LaTeX, see this introduction.

A template for your scribe notes is here: template.tex

Lectures


Recitations


Problem sets


Course Description

With the growing number of massive datasets in applications such as machine learning and numerical linear algebra, classical algorithms for processing such datasets are often no longer feasible. In this course we will cover algorithmic techniques, models, and lower bounds for handling such data. A common theme is the use of randomized methods, such as sketching and sampling, to provide dimensionality reduction. In the context of optimization problems, this leads to faster algorithms, and we will see examples of this in the form of least squares regression and low rank approximation of matrices and tensors, as well as robust variants of these problems. In the context of distributed algorithms, dimensionality reduction leads to communication-efficient protocols, while in the context of data stream algorithms, it leads to memory-efficient algorithms. We will study some of the above problems in such models, such as low rank approximation, but also consider a variety of classical streaming problems such as counting distinct elements, finding frequent items, and estimating norms. Finally we will study lower bound methods in these models showing that many of the algorithms we covered are optimal or near-optimal. Such methods are often based on communication complexity and information-theoretic arguments.

References

One recommended reference book is the lecturer's monograph Sketching as a Tool for Numerical Linear Algebra. Slide notes for about half the course are available here: Videos from a previous course I taught on the linear algebra, l1, and weighted slides are available here: videos . Note that mine start on 27-02-2017. The rest of the material will be based on the lecturer's experience and related research papers or surveys.

Materials from the following related courses might be useful in various parts of the course:
Intended audience: The course is indended for both graduate students and advanced undegraduate students with mathematical maturity and comfort with algorithms, discrete probability, and linear algebra. No other prerequisites are required.
Maintained by David Woodruff