Efficient algorithms for kernel aggregation queries

Abstract

Kernel functions support a broad range of applications that require tasks like density estimation, classification, regression or outlier detection. For these tasks, a common online operation is to compute the weighted aggregation of kernel function values with respect to a set of points. However, scalable aggregation methods are still unknown for typical kernel functions (e.g., Gaussian kernel, polynomial kernel, sigmoid kernel and additive kernels) and weighting schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective bounding technique, by leveraging index structures, to speed up the computation of kernel aggregation. In addition, we extend our technique to additive kernel functions, including x2, intersection, JS and Hellinger kernels, which are widely used in different communities, e.g., computer vision, medical science, Geoscience etc. To handle the additive kernel functions, we further develop the novel and effective bound functions to efficiently evaluate the kernel aggregation. Experimental studies on many real datasets reveal that our proposed solution KARL achieves at least one order of magnitude speedup over the state-of-the-art for different types of kernel functions.