AIExplainer
Machine Learning Intermediate 1 min read

What is a sketching?

In unsupervised machine learning, a category of algorithms that perform a preliminary similarity analysis on examples.

In unsupervised machine learning, a category of algorithms that perform a preliminary similarity analysis on examples. Sketching algorithms use a locality-sensitive hash function to identify points that are likely to be similar, and then group them into buckets. Sketching decreases the computation required for similarity calculations on large datasets. Instead of calculating similarity for every single pair of examples in the dataset, we calculate similarity only for each pair of points within each bucket.

Practitioners refer to sketching when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.