Projection-Cost-Preserving Sketches: Proof Strategies and Constructions

In this note we illustrate how common matrix approximation methods, such as random projection and random sampling, yield projection-cost-preserving sketches, as introduced in [FSS13, CEM+15]. A projection-cost-preserving sketch is a matrix approximation which, for a given parameter k, approximately preserves the distance of the target matrix to all k-dimensional subspaces. Such sketches have applications to scalable algorithms for linear algebra, data science, and machine learning. Our goal is to simplify the presentation of proof techniques introduced in [CEM+15] and [CMM17] so that they can serve as a guide for future work. We also refer the reader to [CYD19], which gives a similar simplified exposition of the proof covered in Section 2.