Many applications require recovering a matrix of minimal rank within an affine constraint set, with matrix completion a notable special case. Because the problem is NP-hard in general, it is common to replace the matrix rank with the nuclear norm, which acts as a convenient convex surrogate. While elegant theoretical conditions elucidate when this replacement is likely to be successful, they are highly restrictive and convex algorithms fail when the ambient rank is too high or when the constraint set is poorly structured. Non-convex alternatives fare somewhat better when carefully tuned; however, convergence to locally optimal solutions remains a continuing source of failure. Against this backdrop we derive a deceptively simple and parameter-free probabilistic PCA-like algorithm that is capable, over a wide battery of empirical tests, of successful recovery even at the theoretical limit where the number of measurements equal the degrees of freedom in the unknown low-rank matrix. Somewhat surprisingly, this is possible even when the affine constraint set is highly ill-conditioned. While proving general recovery guarantees remains evasive for non-convex algorithms, Bayesian-inspired or otherwise, we nonetheless show conditions whereby the underlying cost function has a unique stationary point located at the global optimum; no existing cost function we are aware of satisfies this same property. We conclude with a simple computer vision application involving image rectification and a standard collaborative filtering benchmark.
From a probabilistic perspective, previous work has applied Bayesian formalisms to rank minimization problems, although not specifically within an affine constraint set. For example, @cite_10 @cite_15 @cite_21 derive robust PCA algorithms built upon the linear summation of a rank penalty and an element-wise sparsity penalty. In particular, @cite_15 applies an MCMC sampling approach for posterior inference, but the resulting iterations are not scalable, subjectable to detailed analysis, nor readily adaptable to affine constraints. In contrast, @cite_10 applies a similar probabilistic model but performs inference using a variational mean-field approximation. While the special case of matrix completion is considered, from an empirical standpoint its estimation accuracy is not competitive with the state-of-the-art non-convex algorithms mentioned above. Finally, without the element-wise sparsity component intrinsic to robust PCA (which is not our focus here), @cite_21 simply collapses to a regular PCA model with a closed-form solution, so the challenges faced in solving ) do not apply. Consequently, general affine constraints really are a key differentiating factor.
@cite_15 @cite_21 @cite_10
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Numerous applications in data mining and machinelearning require recovering a matrix of minimal rank. Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is a generalframework for handling this kind of problems. Nuclear normbased convex surrogate of the rank function in RPCA iswidely investigated. Under certain assumptions, it can recoverthe underlying true low rank matrix with high probability. However, those assumptions may not hold in real-world applications. Since the nuclear norm approximates the rank byadding all singular values together, which is essentially a '1-norm of the singular values, the resulting approximation erroris not trivial and thus the resulting matrix estimator canbe significantly biased. To seek a closer approximation andto alleviate the above-mentioned limitations of the nuclearnorm, we propose a nonconvex rank approximation. Thisapproximation to the matrix rank is tighter than the nuclearnorm. To solve the associated nonconvex minimization problem, we develop an efficient augmented Lagrange multiplier basedoptimization algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate thatour method outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms inboth accuracy and efficiency. Motivated by the recent developments of nonconvex penalties in sparsity modeling, we propose a nonconvex optimization model for handing the low-rank matrix recovery problem. Different from the famous robust principal component analysis (RPCA), we suggest recovering low-rank and sparse matrices via a nonconvex loss function and a nonconvex penalty. The advantage of the nonconvex approach lies in its stronger robustness. To solve the model, we devise a majorization-minimization augmented Lagrange multiplier (MM-ALM) algorithm which finds the local optimal solutions of the proposed nonconvex model. We also provide an efficient strategy to speedup MM-ALM, which makes the running time comparable with the state-of-the-art algorithm of solving RPCA. Finally, empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our nonconvex approach over RPCA in terms of matrix recovery accuracy. 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. We present a new Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithm for probabilistic programs. Our approach and tool, called R2, has the unique feature of employing program analysis in order to improve the efficiency of MCMC sampling. Given an input program P, R2 propagates observations in P backwards to obtain a semantically equivalent program P′ in which every probabilistic assignment is immediately followed by an observe statement. Inference is performed by a suitably modified version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm that exploits the structure of the program P′. This has the overall effect of preventing rejections due to program executions that fail to satisfy observations in P. We formalize the semantics of probabilistic programs and rigorously prove the correctness of R2. We also empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of R2--in particular, we show that R2 is able to produce results of similar quality as the CHURCH and STAN probabilistic programming tools with much shorter execution time.