The Uniformly Rotated Mondrian Kernel

First proposed by Rahimi and Recht, random features are used to decrease the computational cost of kernel machines in large-scale problems. The Mondrian kernel is one such example of a fast random feature approximation of the Laplace kernel, generated by a computationally efficient hierarchical random partition of the input space known as the Mondrian process. In this work, we study a variation of this random feature map by using uniformly randomly rotated Mondrian processes to approximate a kernel that is invariant under rotations. We obtain a closed-form expression for this isotropic kernel, as well as a uniform convergence rate of the uniformly rotated Mondrian kernel to this limit. To this end, we utilize techniques from the theory of stationary random tessellations in stochastic geometry and prove a new result on the geometry of the typical cell of the superposition of uniformly random rotations of Mondrian tessellations. Finally, we test the empirical performance of this random feature map on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its improved performance over the Mondrian kernel on a debiased dataset.