  We reconsider randomized algorithms for the low-rank approximation of
symmetric positive semi-definite (SPSD) matrices such as Laplacian and kernel
matrices that arise in data analysis and machine learning applications. Our
main results consist of an empirical evaluation of the performance quality and
running time of sampling and projection methods on a diverse suite of SPSD
matrices. Our results highlight complementary aspects of sampling versus
projection methods; they characterize the effects of common data preprocessing
steps on the performance of these algorithms; and they point to important
differences between uniform sampling and nonuniform sampling methods based on
leverage scores. In addition, our empirical results illustrate that existing
theory is so weak that it does not provide even a qualitative guide to
practice. Thus, we complement our empirical results with a suite of worst-case
theoretical bounds for both random sampling and random projection methods.
These bounds are qualitatively superior to existing bounds---e.g. improved
additive-error bounds for spectral and Frobenius norm error and relative-error
bounds for trace norm error---and they point to future directions to make these
algorithms useful in even larger-scale machine learning applications.
