Communication-optimal Distributed Principal Component Analysis in the Column-partition Model

We study the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) problem in the distributed and streaming models of computation. Given a matrix $A \in R^{m \times n},$ a rank parameter $k < rank(A)$, and an accuracy parameter $0 < \epsilon < 1$, we want to output an $m \times k$ orthonormal matrix $U$ for which $$ || A - U U^T ||_F^2 \le \left(1 + \epsilon \right) \cdot || A - A_k||_F^2, $$ where $A_k \in R^{m \times n}$ is the best rank-$k$ approximation to $A$. This paper provides improved algorithms for distributed PCA and streaming PCA.