We consider the problem of reconstructing a low rank matrix from noisy observations of a subset of its entries. This task has applications in statistical learning, computer vision, and signal processing. In these contexts, "noise" generically refers to any contribution to the data that is not captured by the low-rank model. In most applications, the noise level is large compared to the underlying signal and it is important to avoid overfitting. In order to tackle this problem, we define a regularized cost function well suited for spectral reconstruction methods. Within a random noise model, and in the large system limit, we prove that the resulting accuracy undergoes a phase transition depending on the noise level and on the fraction of observed entries. The cost function can be minimized using OPTSPACE (a manifold gradient descent algorithm). Numerical simulations show that this approach is competitive with state-of-the-art alternatives.
The importance of regularization in matrix completion is well known to practitioners. For instance, one important component of many algorithms competing for the Netflix challenge @cite_2 , consisted in minimizing the cost function @math (this is also known as @cite_0 @cite_9 ). Here the minimization variables are @math , @math . Unlike in , these matrices are not constrained to be orthogonal, and as a consequence the problem becomes significantly more degenerate. Notice that, in our approach, the orthogonality constraint fixes the norms @math , @math . This motivates the use of @math as a regularization term.
@cite_0 @cite_9 @cite_2
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We investigate the minimization of Newton's functional for the problem of the body of minimal resistance with maximal height @math cite butt in the class of convex developable functions defined in a disc. This class is a natural candidate to find a (non-radial) minimizer in accordance with the results of cite lrp2. We prove that the minimizer in this class has a minimal set in the form of a regular polygon with @math sides centered in the disc, and numerical experiments indicate that the natural number @math is a non-decreasing function of @math . The corresponding functions all achieve a lower value of the functional than the optimal radially symmetric function with the same height @math . The little Grothendieck problem consists of maximizing @math źijCijxixj for a positive semidefinite matrix C, over binary variables @math xiź ?1 . In this paper we focus on a natural generalization of this problem, the little Grothendieck problem over the orthogonal group. Given @math CźRdn?dn a positive semidefinite matrix, the objective is to maximize @math źijtrCijTOiOjT restricting @math Oi to take values in the group of orthogonal matrices @math Od, where @math Cij denotes the (ij)-th @math d?d block of C. We propose an approximation algorithm, which we refer to as Orthogonal-Cut, to solve the little Grothendieck problem over the group of orthogonal matrices @math Od and show a constant approximation ratio. Our method is based on semidefinite programming. For a given @math dź1, we show a constant approximation ratio of @math źR(d)2, where @math źR(d) is the expected average singular value of a @math d?d matrix with random Gaussian @math N0,1d i.i.d. entries. For @math d=1 we recover the known @math źR(1)2=2 ź approximation guarantee for the classical little Grothendieck problem. Our algorithm and analysis naturally extends to the complex valued case also providing a constant approximation ratio for the analogous little Grothendieck problem over the Unitary Group @math Ud. Orthogonal-Cut also serves as an approximation algorithm for several applications, including the Procrustes problem where it improves over the best previously known approximation ratio of @math 122. The little Grothendieck problem falls under the larger class of problems approximated by a recent algorithm proposed in the context of the non-commutative Grothendieck inequality. Nonetheless, our approach is simpler and provides better approximation with matching integrality gaps. Finally, we also provide an improved approximation algorithm for the more general little Grothendieck problem over the orthogonal (or unitary) group with rank constraints, recovering, when @math d=1, the sharp, known ratios. This paper introduces a novel algorithm to approximate the matrix with minimum nuclear norm among all matrices obeying a set of convex constraints. This problem may be understood as the convex relaxation of a rank minimization problem and arises in many important applications as in the task of recovering a large matrix from a small subset of its entries (the famous Netflix problem). Off-the-shelf algorithms such as interior point methods are not directly amenable to large problems of this kind with over a million unknown entries. This paper develops a simple first-order and easy-to-implement algorithm that is extremely efficient at addressing problems in which the optimal solution has low rank. The algorithm is iterative, produces a sequence of matrices @math , and at each step mainly performs a soft-thresholding operation on the singular values of the matrix @math . There are two remarkable features making this attractive for low-rank matrix completion problems. The first is that the soft-thresholding operation is applied to a sparse matrix; the second is that the rank of the iterates @math is empirically nondecreasing. Both these facts allow the algorithm to make use of very minimal storage space and keep the computational cost of each iteration low. On the theoretical side, we provide a convergence analysis showing that the sequence of iterates converges. On the practical side, we provide numerical examples in which @math matrices are recovered in less than a minute on a modest desktop computer. We also demonstrate that our approach is amenable to very large scale problems by recovering matrices of rank about 10 with nearly a billion unknowns from just about 0.4 of their sampled entries. Our methods are connected with the recent literature on linearized Bregman iterations for @math minimization, and we develop a framework in which one can understand these algorithms in terms of well-known Lagrange multiplier algorithms. Consider the problem of recovering an unknown signal from undersampled measurements, given the knowledge that the signal has a sparse representation in a specified dictionary @math . This problem is now understood to be well-posed and efficiently solvable under suitable assumptions on the measurements and dictionary if the number of measurements scales roughly with the sparsity level. One sufficient condition for such is the @math -restricted isometry property ( @math -RIP), which asks that the sampling matrix approximately preserve the norm of all signals which are sufficiently sparse in @math . While many classes of random matrices are known to satisfy such conditions, such matrices are not representative of the structural constraints imposed by practical sensing systems. We close this gap in the theory by demonstrating that one can subsample a fixed orthogonal matrix in such a way that the @math -RIP will hold, provided this basis is sufficiently incoherent with the sparsifying dictionary $ ... Let B i be deterministic real symmetric m × m matrices, and ξ i be independent random scalars with zero mean and “of order of one” (e.g., @math ). We are interested to know under what conditions “typical norm” of the random matrix @math is of order of 1. An evident necessary condition is @math , which, essentially, translates to @math ; a natural conjecture is that the latter condition is sufficient as well. In the paper, we prove a relaxed version of this conjecture, specifically, that under the above condition the typical norm of S N is @math : @math for all Ω > 0 We outline some applications of this result, primarily in investigating the quality of semidefinite relaxations of a general quadratic optimization problem with orthogonality constraints @math , where F is quadratic in X = (X 1,... ,X k ). We show that when F is convex in every one of X j , a natural semidefinite relaxation of the problem is tight within a factor slowly growing with the size m of the matrices @math . We provide sharp worst-case evaluation complexity bounds for nonconvex minimization problems with general inexpensive constraints, i.e. problems where the cost of evaluating enforcing of the (possibly nonconvex or even disconnected) constraints, if any, is negligible compared to that of evaluating the objective function. These bounds unify, extend or improve all known upper and lower complexity bounds for unconstrained and convexly-constrained problems. It is shown that, given an accuracy level @math , a degree of highest available Lipschitz continuous derivatives @math and a desired optimality order @math between one and @math , a conceptual regularization algorithm requires no more than @math evaluations of the objective function and its derivatives to compute a suitably approximate @math -th order minimizer. With an appropriate choice of the regularization, a similar result also holds if the @math -th derivative is merely H "older rather than Lipschitz continuous. We provide an example that shows that the above complexity bound is sharp for unconstrained and a wide class of constrained problems, we also give reasons for the optimality of regularization methods from a worst-case complexity point of view, within a large class of algorithms that use the same derivative information. This paper introduces a parallel and distributed algorithm for solving the following minimization problem with linear constraints: @math minimizef1(x1)+ź+fN(xN)subject toA1x1+ź+ANxN=c,x1źX1,ź,xNźXN,where @math Nź2, @math fi are convex functions, @math Ai are matrices, and @math Xi are feasible sets for variable @math xi. Our algorithm extends the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and decomposes the original problem into N smaller subproblems and solves them in parallel at each iteration. This paper shows that the classic ADMM can be extended to the N-block Jacobi fashion and preserve convergence in the following two cases: (i) matrices @math Ai are mutually near-orthogonal and have full column-rank, or (ii) proximal terms are added to the N subproblems (but without any assumption on matrices @math Ai). In the latter case, certain proximal terms can let the subproblem be solved in more flexible and efficient ways. We show that @math źxk+1-xkźM2 converges at a rate of o(1 k) where M is a symmetric positive semi-definte matrix. Since the parameters used in the convergence analysis are conservative, we introduce a strategy for automatically tuning the parameters to substantially accelerate our algorithm in practice. We implemented our algorithm (for the case ii above) on Amazon EC2 and tested it on basis pursuit problems with >300 GB of distributed data. This is the first time that successfully solving a compressive sensing problem of such a large scale is reported. Motivated by some applications in signal processing and machine learning, we consider two convex optimization problems where, given a cone @math K, a norm @math ?·? and a smooth convex function @math f, we want either (1) to minimize the norm over the intersection of the cone and a level set of @math f, or (2) to minimize over the cone the sum of @math f and a multiple of the norm. We focus on the case where (a) the dimension of the problem is too large to allow for interior point algorithms, (b) @math ?·? is "too complicated" to allow for computationally cheap Bregman projections required in the first-order proximal gradient algorithms. On the other hand, we assume that it is relatively easy to minimize linear forms over the intersection of @math K and the unit @math ?·?-ball. Motivating examples are given by the nuclear norm with @math K being the entire space of matrices, or the positive semidefinite cone in the space of symmetric matrices, and the Total Variation norm on the space of 2D images. We discuss versions of the Conditional Gradient algorithm capable to handle our problems of interest, provide the related theoretical efficiency estimates and outline some applications. Consider the problem of finding the local constrained minimum @math of the function f on the set [ F = x R^n | _i (x) 0, _ j + k (x) = 0; i = 1,2, ,k; j = 1,2, ,l . ]One method of solution is to minimize the associated penalty function [ p_0 (x) = f(x) - _ i = 1 ^k ( 0, _i (x) ) + _ j = 1 ^l | _ j + k (x) | for x R^n , 0. ]Let @math be the minimum of this penalty function. It is known that, provided @math is sufficiently small, @math .However, until recently, a serious drawback to this particular penalty function was that its first order derivatives are not everywhere defined. Thus, well-known gradient type methods usually applied to unconstrained optimization problems were necessarily excluded.This paper presents a method that enables a modified form of the gradient type approaches to be applied to a perturbation of the penalt... The recent years have witnessed the emerging of vector quantization (VQ) techniques for efficient similarity search. VQ partitions the feature space into a set of codewords and encodes data points as integer indices using the codewords. Then the distance between data points can be efficiently approximated by simple memory lookup operations. By the compact quantization, the storage cost, and searching complexity are significantly reduced, thereby facilitating efficient large-scale similarity search. However, the performance of several celebrated VQ approaches degrades significantly when dealing with noisy data. In addition, it can barely facilitate a wide range of applications as the distortion measurement only limits to @math norm . To address the shortcomings of the squared Euclidean ( @math norm) loss function employed by the VQ approaches, in this paper, we propose a novel robust and general VQ framework, named RGVQ, to enhance both robustness and generalization of VQ approaches. Specifically, a @math -norm loss function is proposed to conduct the @math -norm similarity search, rather than the @math norm search, and the @math -th order loss is used to enhance the robustness. Despite the fact that changing the loss function to @math norm makes VQ approaches more robust and generic, it brings us a challenge that a non-smooth and non-convex orthogonality constrained @math - norm function has to be minimized. To solve this problem, we propose a novel and efficient optimization scheme and specify it to VQ approaches and theoretically prove its convergence. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed RGVQ is better than the original VQ for several approaches, especially when searching similarity in noisy data. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) determines a lower rank approximation of a matrix @math where an integer @math is given and nonnegativity is imposed on all components of the factors @math and @math . NMF has attracted much attention for over a decade and has been successfully applied to numerous data analysis problems. In applications where the components of the data are necessarily nonnegative, such as chemical concentrations in experimental results or pixels in digital images, NMF provides a more relevant interpretation of the results since it gives nonsubtractive combinations of nonnegative basis vectors. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm for NMF based on alternating nonnegativity constrained least squares (NMF ANLS) and the active set-based fast algorithm for nonnegativity constrained least squares with multiple right-hand side vectors, and we discuss its convergence properties and a rigorous convergence criterion based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. In addition, we also describe algorithms for sparse NMFs and regularized NMF. We show how we impose a sparsity constraint on one of the factors by @math -norm minimization and discuss its convergence properties. Our algorithms are compared to other commonly used NMF algorithms in the literature on several test data sets in terms of their convergence behavior. Alternating minimization represents a widely applicable and empirically successful approach for finding low-rank matrices that best fit the given data. For example, for the problem of low-rank matrix completion, this method is believed to be one of the most accurate and efficient, and formed a major component of the winning entry in the Netflix Challenge. In the alternating minimization approach, the low-rank target matrix is written in a bi-linear form, i.e. @math ; the algorithm then alternates between finding the best @math and the best @math . Typically, each alternating step in isolation is convex and tractable. However the overall problem becomes non-convex and there has been almost no theoretical understanding of when this approach yields a good result. In this paper we present first theoretical analysis of the performance of alternating minimization for matrix completion, and the related problem of matrix sensing. For both these problems, celebrated recent results have shown that they become well-posed and tractable once certain (now standard) conditions are imposed on the problem. We show that alternating minimization also succeeds under similar conditions. Moreover, compared to existing results, our paper shows that alternating minimization guarantees faster (in particular, geometric) convergence to the true matrix, while allowing a simpler analysis. Many data analysis applications deal with large matrices and involve approximating the matrix using a small number of “components.” Typically, these components are linear combinations of the rows and columns of the matrix, and are thus difficult to interpret in terms of the original features of the input data. In this paper, we propose and study matrix approximations that are explicitly expressed in terms of a small number of columns and or rows of the data matrix, and thereby more amenable to interpretation in terms of the original data. Our main algorithmic results are two randomized algorithms which take as input an @math matrix @math and a rank parameter @math . In our first algorithm, @math is chosen, and we let @math , where @math is the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse of @math . In our second algorithm @math , @math , @math are chosen, and we let @math . ( @math and @math are matrices that consist of actual columns and rows, respectively, of @math , and @math is a generalized inverse of their intersection.) For each algorithm, we show that with probability at least @math , @math , where @math is the “best” rank- @math approximation provided by truncating the SVD of @math , and where @math is the Frobenius norm of the matrix @math . The number of columns of @math and rows of @math is a low-degree polynomial in @math , @math , and @math . Both the Numerical Linear Algebra community and the Theoretical Computer Science community have studied variants of these matrix decompositions over the last ten years. However, our two algorithms are the first polynomial time algorithms for such low-rank matrix approximations that come with relative-error guarantees; previously, in some cases, it was not even known whether such matrix decompositions exist. Both of our algorithms are simple and they take time of the order needed to approximately compute the top @math singular vectors of @math . The technical crux of our analysis is a novel, intuitive sampling method we introduce in this paper called “subspace sampling.” In subspace sampling, the sampling probabilities depend on the Euclidean norms of the rows of the top singular vectors. This allows us to obtain provable relative-error guarantees by deconvoluting “subspace” information and “size-of- @math ” information in the input matrix. This technique is likely to be useful for other matrix approximation and data analysis problems. We consider the problem of estimating a deterministic finite alphabet vector @math from underdetermined measurements @math , where @math is a given (random) @math matrix. Two new convex optimization methods are introduced for the recovery of finite alphabet signals via @math -norm minimization. The first method is based on regularization. In the second approach, the problem is formulated as the recovery of sparse signals after a suitable sparse transform. The regularization-based method is less complex than the transform-based one. When the alphabet size @math equals 2 and @math grows proportionally, the conditions under which the signal will be recovered with high probability are the same for the two methods. When @math , the behavior of the transform-based method is established. Experimental results support this theoretical result and show that the transform method outperforms the regularization-based one. We present a framework for solving the large-scale @math -regularized convex minimization problem: [ |x |_1+ f(x). ] Our approach is based on two powerful algorithmic ideas: operator-splitting and continuation. Operator-splitting results in a fixed-point algorithm for any given scalar @math ; continuation refers to approximately following the path traced by the optimal value of @math as @math increases. In this paper, we study the structure of optimal solution sets, prove finite convergence for important quantities, and establish @math -linear convergence rates for the fixed-point algorithm applied to problems with @math convex, but not necessarily strictly convex. The continuation framework, motivated by our convergence results, is demonstrated to facilitate the construction of practical algorithms. Convex and submodular functions play an important role in many applications, and in particular in combinatorial optimization. Here we study two special cases: convexity in one dimension and submodularity in two dimensions. The latter type of functions are equivalent to the well-known Monge matrices. A matrix @math is called a Monge matrix if for every @math and @math we have @math . If inequality holds in the opposite direction, then V is an inverse Monge matrix (supermodular function). Many problems, such as the traveling salesperson problem and various transportation problems, can be solved more efficiently if the input is a Monge matrix. In this work we present testing algorithms for the above properties. A testing algorithm for a predetermined property @math is given query access to an unknown function f and a distance parameter @math . The algorithm should accept f with high probability if it has the property @math and reject it with high probability if more than an @math -fraction of the function values should be modified so that f obtains the property. Our algorithm for testing whether a 1-dimensional function @math is convex (concave) has query complexity and running time of @math . Our algorithm for testing whether an n1 × n2 matrix V is a Monge (inverse Monge) matrix has query complexity and running time of @math . We introduce the framework of blind regression motivated by matrix completion for recommendation systems: given @math users, @math movies, and a subset of user-movie ratings, the goal is to predict the unobserved user-movie ratings given the data, i.e., to complete the partially observed matrix. Following the framework of non-parametric statistics, we posit that user @math and movie @math have features @math and @math respectively, and their corresponding rating @math is a noisy measurement of @math for some unknown function @math . In contrast with classical regression, the features @math are not observed, making it challenging to apply standard regression methods to predict the unobserved ratings. Inspired by the classical Taylor's expansion for differentiable functions, we provide a prediction algorithm that is consistent for all Lipschitz functions. In fact, the analysis through our framework naturally leads to a variant of collaborative filtering, shedding insight into the widespread success of collaborative filtering in practice. Assuming each entry is sampled independently with probability at least @math with @math , we prove that the expected fraction of our estimates with error greater than @math is less than @math plus a polynomially decaying term, where @math is the variance of the additive entry-wise noise term. Experiments with the MovieLens and Netflix datasets suggest that our algorithm provides principled improvements over basic collaborative filtering and is competitive with matrix factorization methods. Consider an @math matrix @math with the restricted isometry property of order k and level @math ; that is, the norm of any k-sparse vector in @math is preserved to within a multiplicative factor of @math under application of @math . We show that by randomizing the column signs of such a matrix @math , the resulting map with high probability embeds any fixed set of @math points in @math into @math without distorting the norm of any point in the set by more than a factor of @math . Consequently, matrices with the restricted isometry property and with randomized column signs provide optimal Johnson–Lindenstrauss embeddings up to logarithmic factors in N. In particular, our results improve the best known bounds on the necessary embedding dimension m for a wide class of structured random matrices; for partial Fourier and partial Hadamard matrices, we improve the recent bound @math given by Ailon and Liberty to $m... Motivated by applications in which the data may be formulated as a matrix, we consider algorithms for several common linear algebra problems. These algorithms make more efficient use of computational resources, such as the computation time, random access memory (RAM), and the number of passes over the data, than do previously known algorithms for these problems. In this paper, we devise two algorithms for the matrix multiplication problem. Suppose @math and @math (which are @math and @math , respectively) are the two input matrices. In our main algorithm, we perform @math independent trials, where in each trial we randomly sample an element of @math with an appropriate probability distribution @math on @math . We form an @math matrix @math consisting of the sampled columns of @math , each scaled appropriately, and we form a @math matrix @math using the corresponding rows of @math , again scaled appropriately. The choice of @math and the column and row scaling are crucial features of the algorithm. When these are chosen judiciously, we show that @math is a good approximation to @math . More precisely, we show that @math where @math denotes the Frobenius norm, i.e., @math . This algorithm can be implemented without storing the matrices @math and @math in RAM, provided it can make two passes over the matrices stored in external memory and use @math additional RAM to construct @math and @math . We then present a second matrix multiplication algorithm which is similar in spirit to our main algorithm. In addition, we present a model (the pass-efficient model) in which the efficiency of these and other approximate matrix algorithms may be studied and which we argue is well suited to many applications involving massive data sets. In this model, the scarce computational resources are the number of passes over the data and the additional space and time required by the algorithm. The input matrices may be presented in any order of the entries (and not just row or column order), as is the case in many applications where, e.g., the data has been written in by multiple agents. In addition, the input matrices may be presented in a sparse representation, where only the nonzero entries are written. A Fixed-Parameter Tractable ( ) @math -approximation algorithm for a minimization (resp. maximization) parameterized problem @math is an FPT algorithm that, given an instance @math computes a solution of cost at most @math (resp. @math ) if a solution of cost at most (resp. at least) @math exists; otherwise the output can be arbitrary. For well-known intractable problems such as the W[1]-hard Clique and W[2]-hard Set Cover problems, the natural question is whether we can get any -approximation. It is widely believed that both Clique and Set-Cover admit no FPT @math -approximation algorithm, for any increasing function @math . Assuming standard conjectures such as the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) eth-paturi and the Projection Games Conjecture (PGC) r3 , we make the first progress towards proving this conjecture by showing that 1. Under the ETH and PGC, there exist constants @math such that the Set Cover problem does not admit an FPT approximation algorithm with ratio @math in @math time, where @math is the size of the universe and @math is the number of sets. 2. Unless @math , for every @math there exists a constant @math such that Clique has no FPT cost approximation with ratio @math in @math time, where @math is the number of vertices in the graph. In the second part of the paper we consider various W[1]-hard problems such as , , Directed Steiner Network and . For all these problem we give polynomial time @math -approximation algorithms for some small function @math (the largest approximation ratio we give is @math ).