We present novel techniques for analyzing the problem of low-rank matrix recovery. The methods are both considerably simpler and more general than previous approaches. It is shown that an unknown matrix of rank can be efficiently reconstructed from only randomly sampled expansion coefficients with respect to any given matrix basis. The number quantifies the “degree of incoherence” between the unknown matrix and the basis. Existing work concentrated mostly on the problem of “matrix completion” where one aims to recover a low-rank matrix from randomly selected matrix elements. Our result covers this situation as a special case. The proof consists of a series of relatively elementary steps, which stands in contrast to the highly involved methods previously employed to obtain comparable results. In cases where bounds had been known before, our estimates are slightly tighter. We discuss operator bases which are incoherent to all low-rank matrices simultaneously. For these bases, we show that randomly sampled expansion coefficients suffice to recover any low-rank matrix with high probability. The latter bound is tight up to multiplicative constants.
We first published these results in @cite_29 , a short paper written with a physics audience in mind. This pre-print contains all the main ideas of the current work, and a complete proof of Theorem for Fourier-type bases (the case of interest in quantum tomography). We announced in @cite_29 that a more detailed exposition of the new method, applying to the general low-rank matrix recovery problem with respect to arbitrary bases, was in preparation.
@cite_29
2963583445 2539873326 2962909343 2611328865
Abstract We study the recovery of Hermitian low rank matrices X ∈ C n × n from undersampled measurements via nuclear norm minimization. We consider the particular scenario where the measurements are Frobenius inner products with random rank-one matrices of the form a j a j ⁎ for some measurement vectors a 1 , … , a m , i.e., the measurements are given by b j = tr ( X a j a j ⁎ ) . The case where the matrix X = x x ⁎ to be recovered is of rank one reduces to the problem of phaseless estimation (from measurements b j = | 〈 x , a j 〉 | 2 ) via the PhaseLift approach, which has been introduced recently. We derive bounds for the number m of measurements that guarantee successful uniform recovery of Hermitian rank r matrices, either for the vectors a j , j = 1 , … , m , being chosen independently at random according to a standard Gaussian distribution, or a j being sampled independently from an (approximate) complex projective t-design with t = 4 . In the Gaussian case, we require m ≥ C r n measurements, while in the case of 4-designs we need m ≥ Cr n log ⁡ ( n ) . Our results are uniform in the sense that one random choice of the measurement vectors a j guarantees recovery of all rank r-matrices simultaneously with high probability. Moreover, we prove robustness of recovery under perturbation of the measurements by noise. The result for approximate 4-designs generalizes and improves a recent bound on phase retrieval due to Gross, Krahmer and Kueng. In addition, it has applications in quantum state tomography. Our proofs employ the so-called bowling scheme which is based on recent ideas by Mendelson and Koltchinskii. We prove that low-rank matrices can be recovered efficiently from a small number of measurements that are sampled from orbits of a certain matrix group. As a special case, our theory makes statements about the phase retrieval problem. Here, the task is to recover a vector given only the amplitudes of its inner product with a small number of vectors from an orbit. Variants of the group in question have appeared under different names in many areas of mathematics. In coding theory and quantum information, it is the complex Clifford group; in time-frequency analysis the oscillator group; and in mathematical physics the metaplectic group. It affords one particularly small and highly structured orbit that includes and generalizes the discrete Fourier basis: While the Fourier vectors have coefficients of constant modulus and phases that depend linearly on their index, the vectors in said orbit have phases with a quadratic dependence. In quantum information, the orbit is used extensively and is known as the set of stabilizer states. We argue that due to their rich geometric structure and their near-optimal recovery properties, stabilizer states form an ideal model for structured measurements for phase retrieval. Our results hold for @math measurements, where the oversampling factor k varies between @math and @math depending on the orbit. The reconstruction is stable towards both additive noise and deviations from the assumption of low rank. If the matrices of interest are in addition positive semidefinite, reconstruction may be performed by a simple constrained least squares regression. Our proof methods could be adapted to cover orbits of other groups. 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. We consider a problem of considerable practical interest: the recovery of a data matrix from a sampling of its entries. Suppose that we observe m entries selected uniformly at random from a matrix M. Can we complete the matrix and recover the entries that we have not seen? We show that one can perfectly recover most low-rank matrices from what appears to be an incomplete set of entries. We prove that if the number m of sampled entries obeys @math for some positive numerical constant C, then with very high probability, most n×n matrices of rank r can be perfectly recovered by solving a simple convex optimization program. This program finds the matrix with minimum nuclear norm that fits the data. The condition above assumes that the rank is not too large. However, if one replaces the 1.2 exponent with 1.25, then the result holds for all values of the rank. Similar results hold for arbitrary rectangular matrices as well. Our results are connected with the recent literature on compressed sensing, and show that objects other than signals and images can be perfectly reconstructed from very limited information.