A spectral mixture representation of isotropic kernels with application to random Fourier features

Rahimi and Recht (2007) introduced the idea of decomposing positive definite shift-invariant kernels by randomly sampling from their spectral distribution for machine learning applications. This famous technique, known as Random Fourier Features (RFF), is in principle applicable to any such kernel whose spectral distribution can be identified and simulated. In practice, however, it is usually applied to the Gaussian kernel because of its simplicity, since its spectral distribution is also Gaussian. Clearly, simple spectral sampling formulas would be desirable for broader classes of kernels. In this paper, we show that the spectral distribution of positive definite isotropic kernels in ℝd for all d≥1 can be decomposed as a scale mixture of α-stable random vectors, and we identify the mixing distribution as a function of the kernel. This constructive decomposition provides a simple and ready-to-use spectral sampling formula for many multivariate positive definite shift-invariant kernels, including exponential power kernels, and generalized Cauchy kernels, as well as newly introduced kernels such as the generalized Mat'ern, Tricomi, and Fox H kernels. In particular, we retrieve the fact that the spectral distributions of these kernels, which can only be explicited in terms of the Fox H special function, are scale mixtures of the multivariate Gaussian distribution, along with an explicit mixing distribution formula. This result has broad applications for support vector machines, kernel ridge regression, Gaussian processes, and other kernel-based machine learning techniques for which the random Fourier features technique is applicable.