We propose a new algorithm to learn a dictionary for reconstructing and sparsely encoding signals from measurements without phase. Specifically, we consider the task of estimating a two-dimensional image from squared-magnitude measurements of a complex-valued linear transformation of the original image. Several recent phase retrieval algorithms exploit underlying sparsity of the unknown signal in order to improve recovery performance. In this work, we consider such a sparse signal prior in the context of phase retrieval, when the sparsifying dictionary is not known in advance. Our algorithm jointly reconstructs the unknown signal—possibly corrupted by noise—and learns a dictionary such that each patch of the estimated image can be sparsely represented. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach can obtain significantly better reconstructions for phase retrieval problems with noise than methods that cannot exploit such “hidden” sparsity. Moreover, on the theoretical side, we provide a convergence result for our method.
Further algorithmic techniques to tackle include two different semidefinite relaxation approaches, PhaseLift @cite_28 and PhaseCut @cite_8 . PhaseLift lifts'' into the space of (complex) positive semidefinite rank- @math matrices via the variable transformation @math . Then, the nonlinear constraints @math are equivalent to constraints with respect to the matrix variable @math . By suitably relaxing the immediate but intractable rank-minimization objective, one obtains a convex semidefinite program (SDP). Similarly, PhaseCut introduces a separate variable @math for the phase, allowing to eliminate @math , and then lifts @math to obtain an equivalent problem with a rank- @math -constraint, which can be dropped to obtain a different SDP relaxation of . Despite some guarantees on when these relaxations are tight, i.e., allow for correctly recovering the solution to (again up to a global phase factor), their practical applicability is limited due to the dimension of the SDP that grows quadratically with the problem dimension.
@cite_28 @cite_8
2533223407 2031923588 2791521719 2963545258 2949393806 1868531013 2615873886 2023710022 2146130798 2508366294 2130517245 2598300585 2174754147 2950162031 2949351217 2145080587 2963131734 2137825973 2950319503 2951927428
We propose a flexible convex relaxation for the phase retrieval problem that operates in the natural domain of the signal. Therefore, we avoid the prohibitive computational cost associated with "lifting" and semidefinite programming (SDP) in methods such as PhaseLift and compete with recently developed non-convex techniques for phase retrieval. We relax the quadratic equations for phaseless measurements to inequality constraints each of which representing a symmetric "slab". Through a simple convex program, our proposed estimator finds an extreme point of the intersection of these slabs that is best aligned with a given anchor vector. We characterize geometric conditions that certify success of the proposed estimator. Furthermore, using classic results in statistical learning theory, we show that for random measurements the geometric certificates hold with high probability at an optimal sample complexity. Phase transition of our estimator is evaluated through simulations. Our numerical experiments also suggest that the proposed method can solve phase retrieval problems with coded diffraction measurements as well. We introduce a method for proving lower bounds on the efficacy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for combinatorial problems. In particular, we show that the cut, TSP, and stable set polytopes on n-vertex graphs are not the linear image of the feasible region of any SDP (i.e., any spectrahedron) of dimension less than 2nδ, for some constant δ > 0. This result yields the first super-polynomial lower bounds on the semidefinite extension complexity of any explicit family of polytopes. Our results follow from a general technique for proving lower bounds on the positive semidefinite rank of a matrix. To this end, we establish a close connection between arbitrary SDPs and those arising from the sum-of-squares SDP hierarchy. For approximating maximum constraint satisfaction problems, we prove that SDPs of polynomial-size are equivalent in power to those arising from degree-O(1) sum-of-squares relaxations. This result implies, for instance, that no family of polynomial-size SDP relaxations can achieve better than a 7 8-approximation for max-sat. We consider the problem of estimating the discrete clustering structures under Sub-Gaussian Mixture Models. Our main results establish a hidden integrality property of a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for this problem: while the optimal solutions to the SDP are not integer-valued in general, their estimation errors can be upper bounded in terms of the error of an idealized integer program. The error of the integer program, and hence that of the SDP, are further shown to decay exponentially in the signal-to-noise ratio. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exponentially decaying error bound for convex relaxations of mixture models, and our results reveal the "global-to-local" mechanism that drives the performance of the SDP relaxation. A corollary of our results shows that in certain regimes the SDP solutions are in fact integral and exact, improving on existing exact recovery results for convex relaxations. More generally, our results establish sufficient conditions for the SDP to correctly recover the cluster memberships of @math fraction of the points for any @math . As a special case, we show that under the @math -dimensional Stochastic Ball Model, SDP achieves non-trivial (sometimes exact) recovery when the center separation is as small as @math , which complements previous exact recovery results that require constant separation. Resolving a conjecture of Abbe, Bandeira, and Hall, the authors have recently shown that the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the maximum likelihood estimator achieves the sharp threshold for exactly recovering the community structure under the binary stochastic block model (SBM) of two equal-sized clusters. The same was shown for the case of a single cluster and outliers. Extending the proof techniques, in this paper, it is shown that SDP relaxations also achieve the sharp recovery threshold in the following cases: 1) binary SBM with two clusters of sizes proportional to network size but not necessarily equal; 2) SBM with a fixed number of equal-sized clusters; and 3) binary censored block model with the background graph being Erdős–Renyi. Furthermore, a sufficient condition is given for an SDP procedure to achieve exact recovery for the general case of a fixed number of clusters plus outliers. These results demonstrate the versatility of SDP relaxation as a simple, general purpose, computationally feasible methodology for community detection. We show a new way to round vector solutions of semidefinite programming (SDP) hierarchies into integral solutions, based on a connection between these hierarchies and the spectrum of the input graph. We demonstrate the utility of our method by providing a new SDP-hierarchy based algorithm for constraint satisfaction problems with 2-variable constraints (2-CSP's). More concretely, we show for every 2-CSP instance I a rounding algorithm for r rounds of the Lasserre SDP hierarchy for I that obtains an integral solution that is at most worse than the relaxation's value (normalized to lie in [0,1]), as long as r > k ( ) ( ) ;, where k is the alphabet size of I, @math , and @math denotes the number of eigenvalues larger than @math in the normalized adjacency matrix of the constraint graph of @math . In the case that @math is a instance, the threshold @math is only a polynomial in @math , and is independent of the alphabet size. Also in this case, we can give a non-trivial bound on the number of rounds for instance. In particular our result yields an SDP-hierarchy based algorithm that matches the performance of the recent subexponential algorithm of Arora, Barak and Steurer (FOCS 2010) in the worst case, but runs faster on a natural family of instances, thus further restricting the set of possible hard instances for Khot's Unique Games Conjecture. Our algorithm actually requires less than the @math constraints specified by the @math level of the Lasserre hierarchy, and in some cases @math rounds of our program can be evaluated in time @math . Resolving a conjecture of Abbe, Bandeira and Hall, the authors have recently shown that the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the maximum likelihood estimator achieves the sharp threshold for exactly recovering the community structure under the binary stochastic block model of two equal-sized clusters. The same was shown for the case of a single cluster and outliers. Extending the proof techniques, in this paper it is shown that SDP relaxations also achieve the sharp recovery threshold in the following cases: (1) Binary stochastic block model with two clusters of sizes proportional to network size but not necessarily equal; (2) Stochastic block model with a fixed number of equal-sized clusters; (3) Binary censored block model with the background graph being Erd o s-R 'enyi. Furthermore, a sufficient condition is given for an SDP procedure to achieve exact recovery for the general case of a fixed number of clusters plus outliers. These results demonstrate the versatility of SDP relaxation as a simple, general purpose, computationally feasible methodology for community detection. Recent breakthroughs have been made in the use of semi-definite programming and its application to real polynomial solving. For example, the real radical of a zero dimensional ideal, can be determined by such approaches. Some progress has been made on the determination of the real radical in positive dimension by Ma, Wang and Zhi[5, 4]. Such work involves the determination of maximal rank semidefinite matrices. Existing methods are computationally expensive and have poorer accuracy on larger examples. In previous work we showed that regularity in the form of the Slater constraint qualification (strict feasibility) fails for the moment matrix in the SDP feasibility problem[6]. We used facial reduction to obtain a smaller regularized problem for which strict feasibility holds. However we did not have a theoretical guarantee that our methods, based on facial reduction and Douglas-Rachford iteration ensured the satisfaction of the maximum rank condition. Our work is motivated by the problems above. We discuss how to compute the moment matrix and its kernel using facial reduction techniques where the maximum rank property can be guaranteed by solving the dual problem. The facial reduction algorithms on the primal form is presented. We give examples that exhibit for the first time additional facial reductions beyond the first which are effective in practice with much better accuracy than SeDuMi(CVX). Semidefinite programming (SDP) is currently one of the most active areas of research in optimization. SDP has attracted researchers from a wide variety of areas because of its theoretical and numerical elegance as well as its wide applicability. In this paper we present a survey of two major areas of application for SDP, namely discrete optimization and matrix completion problems.In the first part of this paper we present a recipe for finding SDP relaxations based on adding redundant constraints and using Lagrangian relaxation. We illustrate this with several examples. We first show that many relaxations for the max-cut problem (MC) are equivalent to both the Lagrangian and the well-known SDP relaxation. We then apply the recipe to obtain new strengthened SDP relaxations for MC as well as known SDP relaxations for several other hard discrete optimization problems.In the second part of this paper we discuss two completion problems, the positive semidefinite matrix completion problem and the Euclidean distance matrix completion problem. We present some theoretical results on the existence of such completions and then proceed to the application of SDP to find approximate completions. We conclude this paper with a new application of SDP to find approximate matrix completions for large and sparse instances of Euclidean distance matrices. We use convex relaxation techniques to provide a sequence of regularized low-rank solutions for large-scale matrix completion problems. Using the nuclear norm as a regularizer, we provide a simple and very efficient convex algorithm for minimizing the reconstruction error subject to a bound on the nuclear norm. Our algorithm SOFT-IMPUTE iteratively replaces the missing elements with those obtained from a soft-thresholded SVD. With warm starts this allows us to efficiently compute an entire regularization path of solutions on a grid of values of the regularization parameter. The computationally intensive part of our algorithm is in computing a low-rank SVD of a dense matrix. Exploiting the problem structure, we show that the task can be performed with a complexity of order linear in the matrix dimensions. Our semidefinite-programming algorithm is readily scalable to large matrices; for example SOFT-IMPUTE takes a few hours to compute low-rank approximations of a 106 X 106 incomplete matrix with 107 observed entries, and fits a rank-95 approximation to the full Netflix training set in 3.3 hours. Our methods achieve good training and test errors and exhibit superior timings when compared to other competitive state-of-the-art techniques. Minimization of the nuclear norm is often used as a surrogate, convex relaxation, for finding the minimum rank completion (recovery) of a partial matrix. The minimum nuclear norm problem can be solved as a trace minimization semidefinite programming problem, (SDP). The SDP and its dual are regular in the sense that they both satisfy strict feasibility. Interior point algorithms are the current methods of choice for these problems. This means that it is difficult to solve large scale problems and difficult to get high accuracy solutions. In this paper we take advantage of the structure at optimality for the minimum nuclear norm problem. We show that even though strict feasibility holds, the facial reduction framework can be successfully applied to obtain a proper face that contains the optimal set, and thus can dramatically reduce the size of the final nuclear norm problem while guaranteeing a low-rank solution. We include numerical tests for both exact and noisy cases. In all cases we assume that knowledge of a target rank is available. The problem of obtaining the maximum a posteriori estimate of a general discrete Markov random field (i.e., a Markov random field defined using a discrete set of labels) is known to be NP-hard. However, due to its central importance in many applications, several approximation algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we present an analysis of three such algorithms based on convex relaxations: (i) LP-S: the linear programming (LP) relaxation proposed by Schlesinger (1976) for a special case and independently in (2001), (1998), and (2005) for the general case; (ii) QP-RL: the quadratic programming (QP) relaxation of Ravikumar and Lafferty (2006); and (iii) SOCP-MS: the second order cone programming (SOCP) relaxation first proposed by Muramatsu and Suzuki (2003) for two label problems and later extended by (2006) for a general label set. We show that the SOCP-MS and the QP-RL relaxations are equivalent. Furthermore, we prove that despite the flexibility in the form of the constraints objective function offered by QP and SOCP, the LP-S relaxation strictly dominates (i.e., provides a better approximation than) QP-RL and SOCP-MS. We generalize these results by defining a large class of SOCP (and equivalent QP) relaxations which is dominated by the LP-S relaxation. Based on these results we propose some novel SOCP relaxations which define constraints using random variables that form cycles or cliques in the graphical model representation of the random field. Using some examples we show that the new SOCP relaxations strictly dominate the previous approaches. The problem of estimating the phases (angles) of a complex unit-modulus vector @math from their noisy pairwise relative measurements @math , where @math is a complex-valued Gaussian random matrix, is known as phase synchronization. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is a solution to a unit--modulus-constrained quadratic programming problem, which is nonconvex. Existing works have proposed polynomial-time algorithms such as a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation or the generalized power method (GPM). Numerical experiments suggest that both of these methods succeed with high probability for @math up to @math , yet existing analyses only confirm this observation for @math up to @math . In this paper, we bridge the gap by proving that the SDP relaxation is tight for @math , and GPM converges to the global optimum under the same regime. Moreover, we establish a linear convergence rate for GPM, and derive a tight... Statistical inference problems arising within signal processing, data mining, and machine learning naturally give rise to hard combinatorial optimization problems. These problems become intractable when the dimensionality of the data is large, as is often the case for modern datasets. A popular idea is to construct convex relaxations of these combinatorial problems, which can be solved efficiently for large-scale datasets. Semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations are among the most powerful methods in this family and are surprisingly well suited for a broad range of problems where data take the form of matrices or graphs. It has been observed several times that when the statistical noise is small enough, SDP relaxations correctly detect the underlying combinatorial structures. In this paper we develop asymptotic predictions for several detection thresholds, as well as for the estimation error above these thresholds. We study some classical SDP relaxations for statistical problems motivated by graph synchronization and community detection in networks. We map these optimization problems to statistical mechanics models with vector spins and use nonrigorous techniques from statistical mechanics to characterize the corresponding phase transitions. Our results clarify the effectiveness of SDP relaxations in solving high-dimensional statistical problems. We investigate the clustering performances of the relaxed @math means in the setting of sub-Gaussian Mixture Model (sGMM) and Stochastic Block Model (SBM). After identifying the appropriate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), we prove that the misclassification error decay exponentially fast with respect to this SNR. These partial recovery bounds for the relaxed @math means improve upon results currently known in the sGMM setting. In the SBM setting, applying the relaxed @math means SDP allows to handle general connection probabilities whereas other SDPs investigated in the literature are restricted to the assortative case (where within group probabilities are larger than between group probabilities). Again, this partial recovery bound complements the state-of-the-art results. All together, these results put forward the versatility of the relaxed @math means. The linearly constrained matrix rank minimization problem is widely applicable in many fields such as control, signal processing and system identification. The tightest convex relaxation of this problem is the linearly constrained nuclear norm minimization. Although the latter can be cast as a semidefinite programming problem, such an approach is computationally expensive to solve when the matrices are large. In this paper, we propose fixed point and Bregman iterative algorithms for solving the nuclear norm minimization problem and prove convergence of the first of these algorithms. By using a homotopy approach together with an approximate singular value decomposition procedure, we get a very fast, robust and powerful algorithm, which we call FPCA (Fixed Point Continuation with Approximate SVD), that can solve very large matrix rank minimization problems. Our numerical results on randomly generated and real matrix completion problems demonstrate that this algorithm is much faster and provides much better recoverability than semidefinite programming solvers such as SDPT3. For example, our algorithm can recover 1000 x 1000 matrices of rank 50 with a relative error of 1e-5 in about 3 minutes by sampling only 20 percent of the elements. We know of no other method that achieves as good recoverability. Numerical experiments on online recommendation, DNA microarray data set and image inpainting problems demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms. Phase retrieval seeks to recover a signal @math x ? C p from the amplitude @math | A x | of linear measurements @math A x ? C n . We cast the phase retrieval problem as a non-convex quadratic program over a complex phase vector and formulate a tractable relaxation (called PhaseCut) similar to the classical MaxCut semidefinite program. We solve this problem using a provably convergent block coordinate descent algorithm whose structure is similar to that of the original greedy algorithm in Gerchberg and Saxton (Optik 35:237---246, 1972), where each iteration is a matrix vector product. Numerical results show the performance of this approach over three different phase retrieval problems, in comparison with greedy phase retrieval algorithms and matrix completion formulations. Recovering an unknown complex signal from the magnitude of linear combinations of the signal is referred to as phase retrieval. We present an exact performance analysis of a recently proposed convex-optimization-formulation for this problem, known as PhaseMax. Standard convex-relaxation-based methods in phase retrieval resort to the idea of “lifting” which makes them computationally inefficient, since the number of unknowns is effectively squared. In contrast, PhaseMax is a novel convex relaxation that does not increase the number of unknowns. Instead it relies on an initial estimate of the true signal which must be externally provided. In this paper, we investigate the required number of measurements for exact recovery of the signal in the large system limit and when the linear measurement matrix is random with iid standard normal entries. If @math denotes the dimension of the unknown complex signal and @math the number of phaseless measurements, then in the large system limit, @math measurements is necessary and sufficient to recover the signal with high probability, where @math is the angle between the initial estimate and the true signal. Our result indicates a sharp phase transition in the asymptotic regime which matches the empirical result in numerical simulations. We propose a novel framework for the deterministic construction of linear, near-isometric embeddings of a finite set of data points. Given a set of training points @math , we consider the secant set @math that consists of all pairwise difference vectors of @math , normalized to lie on the unit sphere. We formulate an affine rank minimization problem to construct a matrix @math that preserves the norms of all the vectors in @math up to a distortion parameter @math . While affine rank minimization is NP-hard, we show that this problem can be relaxed to a convex formulation that can be solved using a tractable semidefinite program (SDP). In order to enable scalability of our proposed SDP to very large-scale problems, we adopt a two-stage approach. First, in order to reduce compute time, we develop a novel algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) that we call Nuclear norm minimization with Max-norm constraints (NuMax) to solve the SDP. Second, we develop a greedy, approximate version of NuMax based on the column generation method commonly used to solve large-scale linear programs. We demonstrate that our framework is useful for a number of signal processing applications via a range of experiments on large-scale synthetic and real datasets. We present an algorithm for recovering planted solutions in two well-known models, the stochastic block model and planted constraint satisfaction problems, via a common generalization in terms of random bipartite graphs. Our algorithm matches up to a constant factor the best-known bounds for the number of edges (or constraints) needed for perfect recovery and its running time is linear in the number of edges used. The time complexity is significantly better than both spectral and SDP-based approaches. The main contribution of the algorithm is in the case of unequal sizes in the bipartition (corresponding to odd uniformity in the CSP). Here our algorithm succeeds at a significantly lower density than the spectral approaches, surpassing a barrier based on the spectral norm of a random matrix. Other significant features of the algorithm and analysis include (i) the critical use of power iteration with subsampling, which might be of independent interest; its analysis requires keeping track of multiple norms of an evolving solution (ii) it can be implemented statistically, i.e., with very limited access to the input distribution (iii) the algorithm is extremely simple to implement and runs in linear time, and thus is practical even for very large instances. Minimizing the rank of a matrix subject to affine constraints is a fundamental problem with many important applications in machine learning and statistics. In this paper we propose a simple and fast algorithm SVP (Singular Value Projection) for rank minimization with affine constraints (ARMP) and show that SVP recovers the minimum rank solution for affine constraints that satisfy the "restricted isometry property" and show robustness of our method to noise. Our results improve upon a recent breakthrough by Recht, Fazel and Parillo (RFP07) and Lee and Bresler (LB09) in three significant ways: 1) our method (SVP) is significantly simpler to analyze and easier to implement, 2) we give recovery guarantees under strictly weaker isometry assumptions 3) we give geometric convergence guarantees for SVP even in presense of noise and, as demonstrated empirically, SVP is significantly faster on real-world and synthetic problems. In addition, we address the practically important problem of low-rank matrix completion (MCP), which can be seen as a special case of ARMP. We empirically demonstrate that our algorithm recovers low-rank incoherent matrices from an almost optimal number of uniformly sampled entries. We make partial progress towards proving exact recovery and provide some intuition for the strong performance of SVP applied to matrix completion by showing a more restricted isometry property. Our algorithm outperforms existing methods, such as those of RFP07,CR08,CT09,CCS08,KOM09,LB09 , for ARMP and the matrix-completion problem by an order of magnitude and is also significantly more robust to noise.