For reference on Mahout's Given's N-way QR, see [2]

[2]
http://amath.colorado.edu/faculty/martinss/Pubs/2012_halko_dissertation.pdf
Sections
4.6 ... 4.7

On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Dmitriy Lyubimov <[email protected]> wrote:

> Please look at this survey [1]. I am currently reading thru it. Quite
> comprehensive.
>
> Where it fits us: ssvd, dssvd depend on QR accuracy quite a bit.
>
> What we have right now in "new" algebra DSL is shown there as algorithm 9,
> "Cholesky QR".
>
> The benefit is that it is extremely easy and parallelizable. The problem
> with that guy is that it is quite a bit more unstable compared to
> Householder's or Given's (you can test it even with non-distributed
> matrices, the difference quite apparent, especially in cases that start
> apporaching singularity).
>
> What we had in MR version was something close to what they describe as
> TSQR. Our approach is detailed in Nathan Halko's dissertation (reference is
> given on SSVD page). Our "older" MR version is much better in accuracy.
>
> It is different from TSQR in quite a few things.
>
> First, it is using reordered Given's QR for both reductions and blocking
> QR. using givens QR for blocks allows for sequential processing of input.
> Householder requires pretty much entire matrix loaded first.
>
> Second, it develops algorithm for N-way merges instead of binary merges as
> defined by TSQR. I haven't finish reading implementation details on TSQR,
> but basically what it seems to mean is that TSQR requires dynamic
> scheduling for merge tasks to stay at maximum parallelization efficiency.
> N-way formulation allows to run more than 2 tasks before each reduction
> step, hence, the depth of the tree could be much more shallow (log base N
> instead of log base 2) of number of blocks.
>
> There's also a CAQR algorithm there which i haven't even touched. I think
> it is worth to read thru that.
>
> Bottom line, what i think is that
>
> (1) we need to implement a well parallelized variation of one of TSQR,
> CAQR or Mahout MR N-way Givens QR as a more numerically stable alternative
> to CholeskyQR (aka "thinQR" in the sparkbindings algebra);
>
> (2) I think some of approaches in CAQR must lead to parallelization of
> non-thin decompositions;
>
> (3) they also consider approaches to distributed LU stuff which can open a
> door to solving "non-thin" Ridge regressions and such.
>
> Looking for takers and opinions on CAQR and Mahout's n-way Givens for the
> sparkbindings.
>
> [1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.2159.pdf
>

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