We propose and investigate two new methods to approximate f(A)b for large, sparse, Hermitian matrices A. Computations of this form play an important role in numerous signal processing and machine learning tasks. The main idea behind both methods is to first estimate the spectral density of A, and then find polynomials of a fixed order that better approximate the function f on areas of the spectrum with a higher density of eigenvalues. Compared to state-of-the-art methods such as the Lanczos method and truncated Chebyshev expansion, the proposed methods tend to provide more accurate approximations of f(A)b at lower polynomial orders, and for matrices A with a large number of distinct interior eigenvalues and a small spectral width. We also explore the application of these techniques to (i) fast estimation of the norms of localized graph spectral filter dictionary atoms, and (ii) fast filtering of time-vertex signals.

We explore the probabilistic partition of unity network (PPOU-Net) model in the context of high-dimensional regression problems and propose a general framework focusing on adaptive dimensionality reduction. With the proposed framework, the target function is approximated by a mixture of experts model on a low-dimensional manifold, where each cluster is associated with a fixed-degree polynomial. We present a training strategy that leverages the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. During the training, we alternate between (i) applying gradient descent to update the DNN coefficients; and (ii) using closed-form formulae derived from the EM algorithm to update the mixture of experts model parameters. Under the probabilistic formulation, step (ii) admits the form of embarrassingly paralleliazable weighted least-squares solves. The PPOU-Nets consistently outperform the baseline fully-connected neural networks of comparable sizes in numerical experiments of various data dimensions. We also explore the proposed model in applications of quantum computing, where the PPOU-Nets act as surrogate models for cost landscapes associated with variational quantum circuits.