Subspace estimation from unbalanced and incomplete data matrices: \({\ell_{2,\infty}}\) statistical guarantees (Q2039795)

This paper is concerned with estimating the column space of an unknown low-rank matrix \(A^\ast \in \mathbb R^{d_1\times d_2}\) , given noisy and partial observations of its entries. The authors investigate an efficient spectral method, which operates upon the sample Gram matrix with diagonal deletion. The definition of Gram matrix and the algorithm of spectral method on the diagonal-deleted Gram matrix are given. While this algorithmic idea has been studied before, they establish new statistical guarantees for this method in terms of both \(\ell_2\) and \(\ell_{2,\infty}\) estimation accuracy, which improve upon prior results if \(d_2\) is substantially larger than \(d_1\). The consequences of general theory for three applications of practical importance are established: (1) tensor completion from noisy data, (2) covariance estimation/principal component analysis with missing data and (3) community recovery in bipartite graphs.