A Nonconvex Projection Method for Robust PCA

Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is a well-studied problem with the goal of decomposing a matrix into the sum of low-rank and sparse components. In this paper, we propose a nonconvex feasibility reformulation of RPCA problem and apply an alternating projection method to solve it. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a method that solves RPCA problem without considering any objective function, convex relaxation, or surrogate convex constraints. We demonstrate through extensive numerical experiments on a variety of applications, including shadow removal, background estimation, face detection, and galaxy evolution, that our approach matches and often significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art in various ways.Comment: In the proceedings of Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19

Guarantees of Riemannian Optimization for Low Rank Matrix Completion

We study the Riemannian optimization methods on the embedded manifold of low rank matrices for the problem of matrix completion, which is about recovering a low rank matrix from its partial entries. Assume $m$ entries of an $n\times n$ rank $r$ matrix are sampled independently and uniformly with replacement. We first prove that with high probability the Riemannian gradient descent and conjugate gradient descent algorithms initialized by one step hard thresholding are guaranteed to converge linearly to the measured matrix provided \begin{align*} m\geq C_\kappa n^{1.5}r\log^{1.5}(n), \end{align*} where $C_\kappa$ is a numerical constant depending on the condition number of the underlying matrix. The sampling complexity has been further improved to \begin{align*} m\geq C_\kappa nr^2\log^{2}(n) \end{align*} via the resampled Riemannian gradient descent initialization. The analysis of the new initialization procedure relies on an asymmetric restricted isometry property of the sampling operator and the curvature of the low rank matrix manifold. Numerical simulation shows that the algorithms are able to recover a low rank matrix from nearly the minimum number of measurements