Oblivious Sketching for Logistic Regression

What guarantees are possible for solving logistic regression in one pass over a data stream? To answer this question, we present the first data oblivious sketch for logistic regression. Our sketch can be computed in input sparsity time over a turnstile data stream and reduces the size of a $d$-dimensional data set from $n$ to only $\operatorname{poly}(\mu d\log n)$ weighted points, where $\mu$ is a useful parameter which captures the complexity of compressing the data. Solving (weighted) logistic regression on the sketch gives an $O(\log n)$-approximation to the original problem on the full data set. We also show how to obtain an $O(1)$-approximation with slight modifications. Our sketches are fast, simple, easy to implement, and our experiments demonstrate their practicality.