b-Bit Minwise Hashing in Practice: Large-Scale Batch and Online Learning and Using GPUs for Fast Preprocessing with Simple Hash Functions

In this paper, we study several critical issues which must be tackled before one can apply b-bit minwise hashing to the volumes of data often used industrial applications, especially in the context of search. 1. (b-bit) Minwise hashing requires an expensive preprocessing step that computes k (e.g., 500) minimal values after applying the corresponding permutations for each data vector. We developed a parallelization scheme using GPUs and observed that the preprocessing time can be reduced by a factor of 20-80 and becomes substantially smaller than the data loading time. 2. One major advantage of b-bit minwise hashing is that it can substantially reduce the amount of memory required for batch learning. However, as online algorithms become increasingly popular for large-scale learning in the context of search, it is not clear if b-bit minwise yields significant improvements for them. This paper demonstrates that $b$-bit minwise hashing provides an effective data size/dimension reduction scheme and hence it can dramatically reduce the data loading time for each epoch of the online training process. This is significant because online learning often requires many (e.g., 10 to 100) epochs to reach a sufficient accuracy. 3. Another critical issue is that for very large data sets it becomes impossible to store a (fully) random permutation matrix, due to its space requirements. Our paper is the first study to demonstrate that $b$-bit minwise hashing implemented using simple hash functions, e.g., the 2-universal (2U) and 4-universal (4U) hash families, can produce very similar learning results as using fully random permutations. Experiments on datasets of up to 200GB are presented.

Hashing Algorithms for Large-Scale Learning

In this paper, we first demonstrate that b-bit minwise hashing, whose estimators are positive definite kernels, can be naturally integrated with learning algorithms such as SVM and logistic regression. We adopt a simple scheme to transform the nonlinear (resemblance) kernel into linear (inner product) kernel; and hence large-scale problems can be solved extremely efficiently. Our method provides a simple effective solution to large-scale learning in massive and extremely high-dimensional datasets, especially when data do not fit in memory. We then compare b-bit minwise hashing with the Vowpal Wabbit (VW) algorithm (which is related the Count-Min (CM) sketch). Interestingly, VW has the same variances as random projections. Our theoretical and empirical comparisons illustrate that usually $b$-bit minwise hashing is significantly more accurate (at the same storage) than VW (and random projections) in binary data. Furthermore, $b$-bit minwise hashing can be combined with VW to achieve further improvements in terms of training speed, especially when $b$ is large.