Weighted low-rank approximation (WLRA), a dimensionality reduction technique
for data analysis, has been successfully used in several applications, such as
in collaborative filtering to design recommender systems or in computer vision
to recover structure from motion. In this paper, we study the computational
complexity of WLRA and prove that it is NP-hard to find an approximate
solution, even when a rank-one approximation is sought. Our proofs are based on
a reduction from the maximum-edge biclique problem, and apply to strictly
positive weights as well as binary weights (the latter corresponding to
low-rank matrix approximation with missing data).Comment: Proof of Lemma 4 (Lemma 3 in v1) has been corrected. Some remarks and
comments have been added. Accepted in SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and
Application
