Improving Locality Sensitive Hashing Based Similarity Search and Estimation for Kernels

We present a novel data embedding that significantly reduces the estimation error of locality sensitive hashing (LSH) technique when used in reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Efficient and accurate kernel approximation techniques either involve the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) approach or the Nystrom approximation method. In this work we show that extant LSH methods in this space suffer from a bias problem, that moreover is difficult to estimate apriori. Consequently, the LSH estimate of a kernel is different from that of the KPCA/Nystrom approximation. We provide theoretical rationale for this bias, which is also confirmed empirically. We propose an LSH algorithm that can reduce this bias and consequently our approach can match the KPCA or the Nystrom methods’ estimation accuracy while retaining the traditional benefits of LSH. We evaluate our algorithm on a wide range of realworld image datasets (for which kernels are known to perform well) and show the efficacy of our algorithm using a variety of principled evaluations including mean estimation error, KL divergence and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.