Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms

Abstract In this paper, we study the popularly dubbed matrix completion problem, where the task is to “fill in” the unobserved entries of a matrix from a small subset of observed entries, under the assumption that the underlying matrix is of low rank. Our contributions herein enhance our prior work...

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Main Authors: Mazumder, Rahul, Saldana, Diego, Weng, Haolei
Other Authors: Sloan School of Management
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer US 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/131497
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author Mazumder, Rahul
Saldana, Diego
Weng, Haolei
author2 Sloan School of Management
author_facet Sloan School of Management
Mazumder, Rahul
Saldana, Diego
Weng, Haolei
author_sort Mazumder, Rahul
collection MIT
description Abstract In this paper, we study the popularly dubbed matrix completion problem, where the task is to “fill in” the unobserved entries of a matrix from a small subset of observed entries, under the assumption that the underlying matrix is of low rank. Our contributions herein enhance our prior work on nuclear norm regularized problems for matrix completion (Mazumder et al. in J Mach Learn Res 1532(11):2287–2322, 2010) by incorporating a continuum of nonconvex penalty functions between the convex nuclear norm and nonconvex rank functions. Inspired by Soft-Impute (Mazumder et al. 2010; Hastie et al. in J Mach Learn Res, 2016), we propose NC-Impute—an EM-flavored algorithmic framework for computing a family of nonconvex penalized matrix completion problems with warm starts. We present a systematic study of the associated spectral thresholding operators, which play an important role in the overall algorithm. We study convergence properties of the algorithm. Using structured low-rank SVD computations, we demonstrate the computational scalability of our proposal for problems up to the Netflix size (approximately, a 500,000 $$\times $$× 20,000 matrix with $$10^8$$108 observed entries). We demonstrate that on a wide range of synthetic and real data instances, our proposed nonconvex regularization framework leads to low-rank solutions with better predictive performance when compared to those obtained from nuclear norm problems. Implementations of algorithms proposed herein, written in the R language, are made available on github.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1314972023-12-18T19:51:09Z Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms Mazumder, Rahul Saldana, Diego Weng, Haolei Sloan School of Management Abstract In this paper, we study the popularly dubbed matrix completion problem, where the task is to “fill in” the unobserved entries of a matrix from a small subset of observed entries, under the assumption that the underlying matrix is of low rank. Our contributions herein enhance our prior work on nuclear norm regularized problems for matrix completion (Mazumder et al. in J Mach Learn Res 1532(11):2287–2322, 2010) by incorporating a continuum of nonconvex penalty functions between the convex nuclear norm and nonconvex rank functions. Inspired by Soft-Impute (Mazumder et al. 2010; Hastie et al. in J Mach Learn Res, 2016), we propose NC-Impute—an EM-flavored algorithmic framework for computing a family of nonconvex penalized matrix completion problems with warm starts. We present a systematic study of the associated spectral thresholding operators, which play an important role in the overall algorithm. We study convergence properties of the algorithm. Using structured low-rank SVD computations, we demonstrate the computational scalability of our proposal for problems up to the Netflix size (approximately, a 500,000 $$\times $$× 20,000 matrix with $$10^8$$108 observed entries). We demonstrate that on a wide range of synthetic and real data instances, our proposed nonconvex regularization framework leads to low-rank solutions with better predictive performance when compared to those obtained from nuclear norm problems. Implementations of algorithms proposed herein, written in the R language, are made available on github. 2021-09-20T17:17:19Z 2021-09-20T17:17:19Z 2020-03-14 2020-09-24T21:26:22Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/131497 en https://doi.org/10.1007/s11222-020-09939-5 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature application/pdf Springer US Springer US
spellingShingle Mazumder, Rahul
Saldana, Diego
Weng, Haolei
Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms
title Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms
title_full Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms
title_fullStr Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms
title_full_unstemmed Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms
title_short Matrix completion with nonconvex regularization: spectral operators and scalable algorithms
title_sort matrix completion with nonconvex regularization spectral operators and scalable algorithms
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/131497
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AT wenghaolei matrixcompletionwithnonconvexregularizationspectraloperatorsandscalablealgorithms