Let Q be a distributed Row Matrix in Spark, I want to calculate the cross product of Q with its transpose Q'.
However although a Row Matrix does have a multiply() method, but it can only accept local Matrices as an argument.
Code illustration ( Scala ):
val phi = new RowMatrix(phiRDD) // phiRDD is an instance of RDD[Vector]
val phiTranspose = transposeRowMatrix(phi) // transposeRowMatrix()
// returns the transpose of a RowMatrix
val crossMat = ? // phi * phiTranspose
Note that I want to perform the dot product of 2 Distributed RowMatrix not a distributed one with a local one.
One solution is to use an IndexedRowMatrix as following:
val phi = new IndexedRowMatrix(phiRDD) // phiRDD is an instance of RDD[IndexedRow]
val phiTranspose = transposeMatrix(phi) // transposeMatrix()
// returns the transpose of a Matrix
val crossMat = phi.toBlockMatrix().multiply( phiTranspose.toBlockMatrix()
).toIndexedRowMatrix()
However, I want to use the Row Matrix-Methods such as tallSkinnyQR() and this means that I sholud transform crossMat to a RowMatrix, using .toRowMatrix() method:
val crossRowMat = crossMat.toRowMatrix()
and finally I can apply
crossRowMat.tallSkinnyQR()
but this process includes many transformations between the types of the Distributed Matrices and according to what I understood from MLlib Programming Guide this is expensive:
It is very important to choose the right format to store large and distributed matrices. Converting a distributed matrix to a different format may require a global shuffle, which is quite expensive.
Would someone elaborate, please.
Only distributed matrices which support matrix - matrix multiplication are BlockMatrices. You have to convert your data accordingly - artificial indices are good enough:
new IndexedRowMatrix(
rowMatrix.rows.zipWithIndex.map(x => IndexedRow(x._2, x._1))
).toBlockMatrix match { case m => m.multiply(m.transpose) }