Robust subspace recovery by Tyler's M-estimator

This paper considers the problem of robust subspace recovery: given a set of $N$ points in $\mathbb{R}^D$, if many lie in a $d$-dimensional subspace, then can we recover the underlying subspace? We show that Tyler's M-estimator can be used to recover the underlying subspace, if the percentage of the inliers is larger than $d/D$ and the data points lie in general position. Empirically, Tyler's M-estimator compares favorably with other convex subspace recovery algorithms in both simulations and experiments on real data sets

Robust PCA by Manifold Optimization

Robust PCA is a widely used statistical procedure to recover a underlying low-rank matrix with grossly corrupted observations. This work considers the problem of robust PCA as a nonconvex optimization problem on the manifold of low-rank matrices, and proposes two algorithms (for two versions of retractions) based on manifold optimization. It is shown that, with a proper designed initialization, the proposed algorithms are guaranteed to converge to the underlying low-rank matrix linearly. Compared with a previous work based on the Burer-Monterio decomposition of low-rank matrices, the proposed algorithms reduce the dependence on the conditional number of the underlying low-rank matrix theoretically. Simulations and real data examples confirm the competitive performance of our method