This paper considers probabilistic estimation of a low-rank matrix from non-linear element-wise measurements of its elements. We derive the corresponding approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm and its state evolution. Relying on non-rigorous but standard assumptions motivated by statistical physics, we characterize the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) achievable information theoretically and with the AMP algorithm. Unlike in related problems of linear estimation, in the present setting the MMSE depends on the output channel only trough a single parameter - its Fisher information. We illustrate this striking finding by analysis of submatrix localization, and of detection of communities hidden in a dense stochastic block model. For this example we locate the computational and statistical boundaries that are not equal for rank larger than four.
We analyze the matrix factorization problem. Given a noisy measurement of a product of two matrices, the problem is to estimate back the original matrices. It arises in many applications, such as dictionary learning, blind matrix calibration, sparse principal component analysis, blind source separation, low rank matrix completion, robust principal component analysis, or factor analysis. It is also important in machine learning: unsupervised representation learning can often be studied through matrix factorization. We use the tools of statistical mechanics—the cavity and replica methods—to analyze the achievability and computational tractability of the inference problems in the setting of Bayes-optimal inference, which amounts to assuming that the two matrices have random-independent elements generated from some known distribution, and this information is available to the inference algorithm. In this setting, we compute the minimal mean-squared-error achievable, in principle, in any computational time, and the error that can be achieved by an efficient approximate message passing algorithm. The computation is based on the asymptotic state-evolution analysis of the algorithm. The performance that our analysis predicts, both in terms of the achieved mean-squared-error and in terms of sample complexity, is extremely promising and motivating for a further development of the algorithm. We consider the estimation of a random vector observed through a linear transform followed by a componentwise probabilistic measurement channel. Although such linear mixing estimation problems are generally highly non-convex, Gaussian approximations of belief propagation (BP) have proven to be computationally attractive and highly effective in a range of applications. Recently, Bayati and Montanari have provided a rigorous and extremely general analysis of a large class of approximate message passing (AMP) algorithms that includes many Gaussian approximate BP methods. This paper extends their analysis to a larger class of algorithms to include what we call generalized AMP (G-AMP). G-AMP incorporates general (possibly non-AWGN) measurement channels. Similar to the AWGN output channel case, we show that the asymptotic behavior of the G-AMP algorithm under large i.i.d. Gaussian transform matrices is described by a simple set of state evolution (SE) equations. The general SE equations recover and extend several earlier results, including SE equations for approximate BP on general output channels by Guo and Wang.