An $\ell_{\infty}$ eigenvector perturbation bound and its application to robust covariance estimation
In statistics and machine learning, we are interested in the eigenvectors (or singular vectors) of certain matrices (e.g.\ covariance matrices, data matrices, etc). However, those matrices are usually perturbed by noises or statistical errors, either from random sampling or structural patterns. The Davis-Kahan $\sin \theta$ theorem is often used to bound the difference between the eigenvectors of a matrix $A$ and those of a perturbed matrix $\widetilde{A} = A + E$, in terms of $\ell_2$ norm. In this paper, we prove that when $A$ is a low-rank and incoherent matrix, the $\ell_{\infty}$ norm perturbation bound of singular vectors (or eigenvectors in the symmetric case) is smaller by a factor of $\sqrt{d_1}$ or $\sqrt{d_2}$ for left and right vectors, where $d_1$ and $d_2$ are the matrix dimensions. The power of this new perturbation result is shown in robust covariance estimation, particularly when random variables have heavy tails. There, we propose new robust covariance estimators and establish their asymptotic properties using the newly developed perturbation bound. Our theoretical results are verified through extensive numerical experiments.
Authors:
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Award ID(s):
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10091880
Journal Name:
Journal of machine learning research
Volume:
18
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
1-42
ISSN:
1532-4435
1. Abstract We study the low-rank phase retrieval problem, where our goal is to recover a $d_1\times d_2$ low-rank matrix from a series of phaseless linear measurements. This is a fourth-order inverse problem, as we are trying to recover factors of a matrix that have been observed, indirectly, through some quadratic measurements. We propose a solution to this problem using the recently introduced technique of anchored regression. This approach uses two different types of convex relaxations: we replace the quadratic equality constraints for the phaseless measurements by a search over a polytope and enforce the rank constraint through nuclear norm regularization. The result is a convex program in the space of $d_1 \times d_2$ matrices. We analyze two specific scenarios. In the first, the target matrix is rank-$1$, and the observations are structured to correspond to a phaseless blind deconvolution. In the second, the target matrix has general rank, and we observe the magnitudes of the inner products against a series of independent Gaussian random matrices. In each of these problems, we show that anchored regression returns an accurate estimate from a near-optimal number of measurements given that we have access to an anchor matrix of sufficient quality. We also showmore »
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