This paper presents a remarkably simple, yet powerful, algorithm termed Coherence Pursuit (CoP) to robust Principal Component Analysis (PCA). As inliers lie in a low dimensional subspace and are mostly correlated, an inlier is likely to have strong mutual coherence with a large number of data points. By contrast, outliers either do not admit low dimensional structures or form small clusters. In either case, an outlier is unlikely to bear strong resemblance to a large number of data points. Given that, CoP sets an outlier apart from an inlier by comparing their coherence with the rest of the data points. The mutual coherences are computed by forming the Gram matrix of the normalized data points. Subsequently, the sought subspace is recovered from the span of the subset of the data points that exhibit strong coherence with the rest of the data. As CoP only involves one simple matrix multiplication, it is significantly faster than the state-of-the-art robust PCA algorithms. We derive analytical performance guarantees for CoP under different models for the distributions of inliers and outliers in both noise-free and noisy settings. CoP is the first robust PCA algorithm that is simultaneously non-iterative, provably robust to both unstructured and structured outliers, and can tolerate a large number of unstructured outliers.
In this paper, auto-associative models are proposed as candidates to the generalization of Principal Component Analysis. We show that these models are dedicated to the approximation of the dataset by a manifold. Here, the word "manifold" refers to the topology properties of the structure. The approximating manifold is built by a projection pursuit algorithm. At each step of the algorithm, the dimension of the manifold is incremented. Some theoretical properties are provided. In particular, we can show that, at each step of the algorithm, the mean residuals norm is not increased. Moreover, it i…
Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科技创新研究中心）
Informed by recent work on tensor singular value decomposition and circulant algebra matrices, this paper presents a new theoretical bridge that unifies the hypercomplex and tensor-based approaches to singular value decomposition and robust principal component analysis. We begin our work by extending the principal component pursuit to Olariu's polar $n$-complex numbers as well as their bicomplex counterparts. In so doing, we have derived the polar $n$-complex and $n$-bicomplex proximity operators for both the $\ell_1$- and trace-norm regularizers, which can be used by proximal optimization met…
Recent methods for learning a linear subspace from data corrupted by outliers are based on convex $\ell_1$ and nuclear norm optimization and require the dimension of the subspace and the number of outliers to be sufficiently small. In sharp contrast, the recently proposed Dual Principal Component Pursuit (DPCP) method can provably handle subspaces of high dimension by solving a non-convex $\ell_1$ optimization problem on the sphere. However, its geometric analysis is based on quantities that are difficult to interpret and are not amenable to statistical analysis. In this paper we provide a ref…
Environmental health researchers often aim to identify sources/behaviors that give rise to potentially harmful exposures. We adapted principal component pursuit (PCP)-a robust technique for dimensionality reduction in computer vision and signal processing-to identify patterns in environmental mixtures. PCP decomposes the exposure mixture into a low-rank matrix containing consistent exposure patterns across pollutants and a sparse matrix isolating unique exposure events. We adapted PCP to accommodate non-negative and missing data, and values below a given limit of detection (LOD). We simulated …
The recently established RPCA method provides us a convenient way to restore low-rank matrices from grossly corrupted observations. While elegant in theory and powerful in reality, RPCA may be not an ultimate solution to the low-rank matrix recovery problem. Indeed, its performance may not be perfect even when data are strictly low-rank. This is because conventional RPCA ignores the clustering structures of the data which are ubiquitous in modern applications. As the number of cluster grows, the coherence of data keeps increasing, and accordingly, the recovery performance of RPCA degrades. We …
In this paper we analyze different ways of performing principal component analysis throughout three different approaches: robust covariance and correlation matrix estimation, projection pursuit approach and non-parametric maximum entropy algorithm. The objective of these approaches is the correction of the well known sensitivity to outliers of the classical method for principal component analysis. Due to their robustness, they perform very well in contaminated data, while the classical approach fails to preserve the characteristics of the core information.
We consider the problem of estimating a deterministic sparse vector x from underdetermined measurements Ax+w, where w represents white Gaussian noise and A is a given deterministic dictionary. We analyze the performance of three sparse estimation algorithms: basis pursuit denoising (BPDN), orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), and thresholding. These algorithms are shown to achieve near-oracle performance with high probability, assuming that x is sufficiently sparse. Our results are non-asymptotic and are based only on the coherence of A, so that they are applicable to arbitrary dictionaries. Dif…
Multivariate data is often visualized using linear projections, produced by techniques such as principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, and projection pursuit. A problem with projections is that they obscure low and high density regions near the center of the distribution. Sections, or slices, can help to reveal them. This paper develops a section pursuit method, building on the extensive work in projection pursuit, to search for interesting slices of the data. Linear projections are used to define sections of the parameter space, and to calculate interestingness by comparin…
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校电气与计算机工程系）
Singular Value Decomposition (and Principal Component Analysis) is one of the most widely used techniques for dimensionality reduction: successful and efficiently computable, it is nevertheless plagued by a well-known, well-documented sensitivity to outliers. Recent work has considered the setting where each point has a few arbitrarily corrupted components. Yet, in applications of SVD or PCA such as robust collaborative filtering or bioinformatics, malicious agents, defective genes, or simply corrupted or contaminated experiments may effectively yield entire points that are completely corrupte…
Orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is a widely used compressive sensing (CS) algorithm for recovering sparse signals in noisy linear regression models. The performance of OMP depends on its stopping criteria (SC). SC for OMP discussed in literature typically assumes knowledge of either the sparsity of the signal to be estimated $k_0$ or noise variance $σ^2$, both of which are unavailable in many practical applications. In this article we develop a modified version of OMP called tuning free OMP or TF-OMP which does not require a SC. TF-OMP is proved to accomplish successful sparse recovery under…
College of Information Sciences and Technology（信息科学与技术学院）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学学院）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Microsoft Bing（微软必应）
It has been shown that dimension reduction methods such as PCA may be inherently prone to unfairness and treat data from different sensitive groups such as race, color, sex, etc., unfairly. In pursuit of fairness-enhancing dimensionality reduction, using the notion of Pareto optimality, we propose an adaptive first-order algorithm to learn a subspace that preserves fairness, while slightly compromising the reconstruction loss. Theoretically, we provide sufficient conditions that the solution of the proposed algorithm belongs to the Pareto frontier for all sensitive groups; thereby, the optimal…
We propose a novel value function approximation technique for Markov decision processes. We consider the problem of compactly representing the state-action value function using a low-rank and sparse matrix model. The problem is to decompose a matrix that encodes the true value function into low-rank and sparse components, and we achieve this using Robust Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Under minimal assumptions, this Robust PCA problem can be solved exactly via the Principal Component Pursuit convex optimization problem. We experiment the procedure on several examples and demonstrate that …
It is well known that Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is strongly affected by outliers and a lot of effort has been put into robustification of PCA. In this paper we present a new algorithm for robust PCA minimizing the trimmed reconstruction error. By directly minimizing over the Stiefel manifold, we avoid deflation as often used by projection pursuit methods. In distinction to other methods for robust PCA, our method has no free parameter and is computationally very efficient. We illustrate the performance on various datasets including an application to background modeling and subtraction…
Center for Imaging Science（成像科学中心）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
We extend the theoretical analysis of a recently proposed single subspace learning algorithm, called Dual Principal Component Pursuit (DPCP), to the case where the data are drawn from of a union of hyperplanes. To gain insight into the properties of the $\ell_1$ non-convex problem associated with DPCP, we develop a geometric analysis of a closely related continuous optimization problem. Then transferring this analysis to the discrete problem, our results state that as long as the hyperplanes are sufficiently separated, the dominant hyperplane is sufficiently dominant and the points are uniform…
Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) involves nonconvex optimization for which the global solution is hard to obtain. To address this issue, one popular approach is convex relaxation. However, such an approach may produce suboptimal estimators due to the relaxation effect. To optimally estimate sparse principal subspaces, we propose a two-stage computational framework named "tighten after relax": Within the 'relax' stage, we approximately solve a convex relaxation of sparse PCA with early stopping to obtain a desired initial estimator; For the 'tighten' stage, we propose a novel algorithm…
We propose a new framework -- Square Root Principal Component Pursuit -- for low-rank matrix recovery from observations corrupted with noise and outliers. Inspired by the square root Lasso, this new formulation does not require prior knowledge of the noise level. We show that a single, universal choice of the regularization parameter suffices to achieve reconstruction error proportional to the (a priori unknown) noise level. In comparison, previous formulations such as stable PCP rely on noise-dependent parameters to achieve similar performance, and are therefore challenging to deploy in appli…
Ghent University（根特大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
Methods for Projection Pursuit aim to facilitate the visual exploration of high-dimensional data by identifying interesting low-dimensional projections. A major challenge is the design of a suitable quality metric of projections, commonly referred to as the projection index, to be maximized by the Projection Pursuit algorithm. In this paper, we introduce a new information-theoretic strategy for tackling this problem, based on quantifying the amount of information the projection conveys to a user given their prior beliefs about the data. The resulting projection index is a subjective quantity, …
Dimension reduction techniques for multivariate time series decompose the observed series into a few useful independent/orthogonal univariate components. We develop a spectral domain method for multivariate second-order stationary time series that linearly transforms the observed series into several groups of lower-dimensional multivariate subseries. These multivariate subseries have non-zero spectral coherence among components within a group but have zero spectral coherence among components across groups. The observed series is expressed as a sum of frequency components whose variances are pr…
Chicago Booth School of Business（芝加哥大学布斯商学院）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）
Deep learning is a form of machine learning for nonlinear high dimensional pattern matching and prediction. By taking a Bayesian probabilistic perspective, we provide a number of insights into more efficient algorithms for optimisation and hyper-parameter tuning. Traditional high-dimensional data reduction techniques, such as principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares (PLS), reduced rank regression (RRR), projection pursuit regression (PPR) are all shown to be shallow learners. Their deep learning counterparts exploit multiple deep layers of data reduction which provide predicti…
We consider the problem of learning a linear subspace from data corrupted by outliers. Classical approaches are typically designed for the case in which the subspace dimension is small relative to the ambient dimension. Our approach works with a dual representation of the subspace and hence aims to find its orthogonal complement; as such, it is particularly suitable for subspaces whose dimension is close to the ambient dimension (subspaces of high relative dimension). We pose the problem of computing normal vectors to the inlier subspace as a non-convex $\ell_1$ minimization problem on the sph…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）；Cainiao Network（菜鸟网络）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
We consider the problem of maximizing the $\ell_1$ norm of a linear map over the sphere, which arises in various machine learning applications such as orthogonal dictionary learning (ODL) and robust subspace recovery (RSR). The problem is numerically challenging due to its nonsmooth objective and nonconvex constraint, and its algorithmic aspects have not been well explored. In this paper, we show how the manifold structure of the sphere can be exploited to design fast algorithms for tackling this problem. Specifically, our contribution is threefold. First, we present a manifold proximal point …
This paper proposes efficient algorithms for accurate recovery of direction-of-arrival (DoA) of sources from single-snapshot measurements using compressed beamforming (CBF). In CBF, the conventional sensor array signal model is cast as an underdetermined complex-valued linear regression model and sparse signal recovery methods are used for solving the DoA finding problem. We develop a complex-valued pathwise weighted elastic net (c-PW-WEN) algorithm that finds solutions at knots of penalty parameter values over a path (or grid) of EN tuning parameter values. c-PW-WEN also computes Lasso or wei…
For classification problems, feature extraction is a crucial process which aims to find a suitable data representation that increases the performance of the machine learning algorithm. According to the curse of dimensionality theorem, the number of samples needed for a classification task increases exponentially as the number of dimensions (variables, features) increases. On the other hand, it is costly to collect, store and process data. Moreover, irrelevant and redundant features might hinder classifier performance. In exploratory analysis settings, high dimensionality prevents the users fro…
University at Albany（奥尔巴尼大学）；George Manson University（乔治·曼森大学）
Detection of interesting (e.g., coherent or anomalous) clusters has been studied extensively on plain or univariate networks, with various applications. Recently, algorithms have been extended to networks with multiple attributes for each node in the real-world. In a multi-attributed network, often, a cluster of nodes is only interesting for a subset (subspace) of attributes, and this type of clusters is called subspace clusters. However, in the current literature, few methods are capable of detecting subspace clusters, which involves concurrent feature selection and network cluster detection.…
