  The method of random projections has become very popular for large-scale
applications in statistical learning, information retrieval, bio-informatics
and other applications. Using a well-designed coding scheme for the projected
data, which determines the number of bits needed for each projected value and
how to allocate these bits, can significantly improve the effectiveness of the
algorithm, in storage cost as well as computational speed. In this paper, we
study a number of simple coding schemes, focusing on the task of similarity
estimation and on an application to training linear classifiers. We demonstrate
that uniform quantization outperforms the standard existing influential method
(Datar et. al. 2004). Indeed, we argue that in many cases coding with just a
small number of bits suffices. Furthermore, we also develop a non-uniform 2-bit
coding scheme that generally performs well in practice, as confirmed by our
experiments on training linear support vector machines (SVM).
