In this work, we develop a new complexity metric for an important class of
low-rank matrix optimization problems, where the metric aims to quantify the
complexity of the nonconvex optimization landscape of each problem and the
success of local search methods in solving the problem. The existing literature
has focused on two complexity measures. The RIP constant is commonly used to
characterize the complexity of matrix sensing problems. On the other hand, the
sampling rate and the incoherence are used when analyzing matrix completion
problems. The proposed complexity metric has the potential to unify these two
notions and also applies to a much larger class of problems. To mathematically
study the properties of this metric, we focus on the rank-1 generalized
matrix completion problem and illustrate the usefulness of the new complexity
metric from three aspects. First, we show that instances with the RIP condition
have a small complexity. Similarly, if the instance obeys the Bernoulli
sampling model, the complexity metric will take a small value with high
probability. Moreover, for a one-parameter class of instances, the complexity
metric shows consistent behavior to the first two scenarios. Furthermore, we
establish theoretical results to provide sufficient conditions and necessary
conditions on the existence of spurious solutions in terms of the proposed
complexity metric. This contrasts with the RIP and incoherence notions that
fail to provide any necessary condition