We consider the problem of collaborative filtering from a channel coding perspective. We model the underlying rating matrix as a finite alphabet matrix with block constant structure. The observations are obtained from this underlying matrix through a discrete memoryless channel with a noisy part representing noisy user behavior and an erasure part representing missing data. Moreover, the clusters over which the underlying matrix is constant are unknown. We establish a threshold result for this model: if the largest cluster size is smaller than C1 log(mn) (where the rating matrix is of size m × n), then the underlying matrix cannot be recovered with any estimator, but if the smallest cluster size is larger than C2 log(mn), then we show a polynomial time estimator with asymptotically vanishing probability of error. In the case of uniform cluster size, not only the order of the threshold, but also the constant is identified.
In this paper, we take an alternative channel coding viewpoint of the problem. Our results differ from the above works in several aspects outlined below. We consider finite alphabet for the ratings and a different model for the rating matrix based on row and column clusters. We consider noisy user behavior, and our goal is not to complete the missing entries, but to estimate an underlying block constant" matrix (in the limit as the matrix size grows). Since we consider a finite alphabet, even in the presence of noise, error free recovery is asymptotically feasible. Hence, unlike @cite_9 , which considers real-valued matrices, we do not allow any distortion. We next outline our model and results.
@cite_9
2962909343 2951999827 2962739555 2140867429
In this paper, we improve existing results in the field of compressed sensing and matrix completion when sampled data may be grossly corrupted. We introduce three new theorems. (1) In compressed sensing, we show that if the m×n sensing matrix has independent Gaussian entries, then one can recover a sparse signal x exactly by tractable l 1 minimization even if a positive fraction of the measurements are arbitrarily corrupted, provided the number of nonzero entries in x is O(m (log(n m)+1)). (2) In the very general sensing model introduced in Candes and Plan (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 57(11):7235–7254, 2011) and assuming a positive fraction of corrupted measurements, exact recovery still holds if the signal now has O(m (log2 n)) nonzero entries. (3) Finally, we prove that one can recover an n×n low-rank matrix from m corrupted sampled entries by tractable optimization provided the rank is on the order of O(m (nlog2 n)); again, this holds when there is a positive fraction of corrupted samples. In this paper, we consider the matrix completion problem when the observations are one-bit measurements of some underlying matrix M, and in particular the observed samples consist only of ones and no zeros. This problem is motivated by modern applications such as recommender systems and social networks where only "likes" or "friendships" are observed. The problem of learning from only positive and unlabeled examples, called PU (positive-unlabeled) learning, has been studied in the context of binary classification. We consider the PU matrix completion problem, where an underlying real-valued matrix M is first quantized to generate one-bit observations and then a subset of positive entries is revealed. Under the assumption that M has bounded nuclear norm, we provide recovery guarantees for two different observation models: 1) M parameterizes a distribution that generates a binary matrix, 2) M is thresholded to obtain a binary matrix. For the first case, we propose a "shifted matrix completion" method that recovers M using only a subset of indices corresponding to ones, while for the second case, we propose a "biased matrix completion" method that recovers the (thresholded) binary matrix. Both methods yield strong error bounds --- if M is n by n, the Frobenius error is bounded as O(1 ((1-rho)n), where 1-rho denotes the fraction of ones observed. This implies a sample complexity of O(n n) ones to achieve a small error, when M is dense and n is large. We extend our methods and guarantees to the inductive matrix completion problem, where rows and columns of M have associated features. We provide efficient and scalable optimization procedures for both the methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods for link prediction (on real-world networks consisting of over 2 million nodes and 90 million links) and semi-supervised clustering tasks. In this work we derive fundamental limits for many linear and non-linear sparse signal processing models including group testing, quantized compressive sensing, multivariate regression and observations with missing features. In general, sparse signal processing problems can be characterized in terms of the following Markovian property. We are given a set of N variables X1, X2, ..., XN, and there is an unknown subset of variables S ⊂ 1, 2, ..., N that are relevant for predicting outcomes outputs Y. In other words, when Y is conditioned on Xn nϵS it is conditionally independent of the other variables, Xn n∉S. Our goal is to identify the set S from samples of the variables X and the associated outcomes Y. We characterize this problem as a version of the noisy channel coding problem. Using asymptotic information theoretic analyses, we establish mutual information formulas that provide sufficient and necessary conditions on the number of samples required to successfully recover the salient variables. These mutual information expressions unify conditions for both linear and non-linear observations. We then compute sample complexity bounds for the aforementioned models, based on the mutual information expressions. We consider the problem of recovering two unknown vectors, w and x, of length L from their circular convolution. We make the structural assumption that the two vectors are members of known subspaces, one with dimension N and the other with dimension K. Although the observed convolution is nonlinear in both w and x, it is linear in the rank-1 matrix formed by their outer product wx*. This observation allows us to recast the deconvolution problem as low-rank matrix recovery problem from linear measurements, whose natural convex relaxation is a nuclear norm minimization program. We prove the effectiveness of this relaxation by showing that, for “generic” signals, the program can deconvolve w and x exactly when the maximum of N and K is almost on the order of L. That is, we show that if x is drawn from a random subspace of dimension N, and w is a vector in a subspace of dimension K whose basis vectors are spread out in the frequency domain, then nuclear norm minimization recovers wx* without error. We discuss this result in the context of blind channel estimation in communications. If we have a message of length N, which we code using a random L x N coding matrix, and the encoded message travels through an unknown linear time-invariant channel of maximum length K, then the receiver can recover both the channel response and the message when L ≳ N + K, to within constant and log factors.