DEANN: Speeding up Kernel-Density Estimation using Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

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  • DEANN

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Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is a nonparametric method for estimatig the shape of a density function, given a set of samples from the distribution. Recently, locality-sensitive hashing, originally proposed as a tool for nearest neighbor search, has been shown to enable fast KDE data structures. However, these approaches do not take advantage of the many other advances that have been made in algorithms for nearest neighbor algorithms. We present an algorithm called Density Estimation from Approximate Nearest Neighbors (DEANN) where we apply Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) algorithms as a black box subroutine to compute an unbiased KDE. The idea is to find points that have a large contribution to the KDE using ANN, compute their contribution exactly, and approximate the remainder with Random Sampling (RS). We present a theoretical argument that supports the idea that an ANN subroutine can speed up the evaluation. Furthermore, we provide a C++ implementation with a Python interface that can make use of an arbitrary ANN implementation as a subroutine for KDE evaluation. We show empirically that our implementation outperforms state of the art implementations in all high dimensional datasets we considered, and matches the performance of RS in cases where the ANN yield no gains in performance.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
PublisherPMLR
Publication date2022
Pages3108-3137
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) - Virtuel, Unknown
Duration: 28 Mar 202230 Mar 2022

Exhibition

Exhibition25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
LandUnknown
ByVirtuel
Periode28/03/202230/03/2022
SeriesProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume151
ISSN2640-3498

ID: 340695306