Massive-Scale Kernel Discriminant Analysis: Mining for Quasars

We describe a fast algorithm for kernel discriminant analysis, empirically demonstrating asymptotic speed-up over the previous best approach. We achieve this with a new pattern of processing data stored in hierarchical trees, which incurs low overhead while helping to prune unnecessary work once classification results can be shown, and the use of the Epanechnikov kernel, which allows additional pruning between portions of data shown to be far apart or very near each other. Further, our algorithm may share work between multiple simultaneous bandwidth computations, thus facilitating a rudimentary but nonetheless quick and effective means of bandwidth optimization. We apply a parallelized implementation of our algorithm to a large data set (40 million points in 4D) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, identifying approximately one million quasars with high accuracy. This exceeds the previous largest catalog of quasars in size by a factor of ten.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SDM
• Authors: Ryan Riegel, Alexander Gray, Gordon Richards
• Keywords: Algorithm, Data Mining, Kernel Discriminant Analysis, SDM 2008, Simultaneous Bandwidth Computations