  Scalability of statistical estimators is of increasing importance in modern
applications and dimension reduction is often used to extract relevant
information from data. A variety of popular dimension reduction approaches can
be framed as symmetric generalized eigendecomposition problems. In this paper
we outline how taking into account the low rank structure assumption implicit
in these dimension reduction approaches provides both computational and
statistical advantages. We adapt recent randomized low-rank approximation
algorithms to provide efficient solutions to three dimension reduction methods:
Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR), and
Localized Sliced Inverse Regression (LSIR). A key observation in this paper is
that randomization serves a dual role, improving both computational and
statistical performance. This point is highlighted in our experiments on real
and simulated data.
