Efficient quadratic entropy with distance sketches

Abstract

We detail scalable methods for approximating the quadratic entropy $p^T d p$ for arbitrary distributions $p$ and common distances $d$ of negative type. We focus on the Euclidean and spherical geodesic cases, which both use random feature embeddings and projections to dramatically improve computational complexity within a simple framework. Amortization of a single large matrix multiplication and control variates further enable computation at large scale with low memory and runtime in situations where $d$ is held constant while $p$ varies. We demonstrate this with a comparison against direct pair sampling and bibliometric/scientometric examples on Open Graph Benchmark datasets, revealing papers, fields, and institutions with both particularly narrow and broad interdisciplinary reach from their citations and text features alone.