  There is an especially strong need in modern large-scale data analysis to
prioritize samples for manual inspection. For example, the inspection could
target important mislabeled samples or key vulnerabilities exploitable by an
adversarial attack. In order to solve the "needle in the haystack" problem of
which samples to inspect, we develop a new scalable version of Cook's distance,
a classical statistical technique for identifying samples which unusually
strongly impact the fit of a regression model (and its downstream predictions).
In order to scale this technique up to very large and high-dimensional
datasets, we introduce a new algorithm which we call "influence sketching."
Influence sketching embeds random projections within the influence computation;
in particular, the influence score is calculated using the randomly projected
pseudo-dataset from the post-convergence Generalized Linear Model (GLM). We
validate that influence sketching can reliably and successfully discover
influential samples by applying the technique to a malware detection dataset of
over 2 million executable files, each represented with almost 100,000 features.
For example, we find that randomly deleting approximately 10% of training
samples reduces predictive accuracy only slightly from 99.47% to 99.45%,
whereas deleting the same number of samples with high influence sketch scores
reduces predictive accuracy all the way down to 90.24%. Moreover, we find that
influential samples are especially likely to be mislabeled. In the case study,
we manually inspect the most influential samples, and find that influence
sketching pointed us to new, previously unidentified pieces of malware.
