A method and apparatus based on transposition to speed up learning computations on sparse data are disclosed. For example, the method receives an support vector comprising at least one feature represented by one non-zero entry. The method then identifies at least one column within a matrix with non-zero entries, wherein the at least one column is identified in accordance with the at least one feature of the support vector. The method then performs kernel computations using successive list merging on the at least one identified column of the matrix and the support vector to derive a result vector, wherein the result vector is used in a data learning function.