TY - JOUR
T1 - Inference and uncertainty quantification for noisy matrix completion
AU - Chen, Yuxin
AU - Fan, Jianqing
AU - Ma, Cong
AU - Yan, Yuling
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/11/12
Y1 - 2019/11/12
N2 - Noisy matrix completion aims at estimating a low-rank matrix given only partial and corrupted entries. Despite remarkable progress in designing efficient estimation algorithms, it remains largely unclear how to assess the uncertainty of the obtained estimates and how to perform efficient statistical inference on the unknown matrix (e.g., constructing a valid and short confidence interval for an unseen entry). This paper takes a substantial step toward addressing such tasks. We develop a simple procedure to compensate for the bias of the widely used convex and nonconvex estimators. The resulting debiased estimators admit nearly precise nonasymptotic distributional characterizations, which in turn enable optimal construction of confidence intervals/regions for, say, the missing entries and the low-rank factors. Our inferential procedures do not require sample splitting, thus avoiding unnecessary loss of data efficiency. As a byproduct, we obtain a sharp characterization of the estimation accuracy of our debiased estimators in both rate and constant. Our debiased estimators are tractable algorithms that provably achieve full statistical efficiency.
AB - Noisy matrix completion aims at estimating a low-rank matrix given only partial and corrupted entries. Despite remarkable progress in designing efficient estimation algorithms, it remains largely unclear how to assess the uncertainty of the obtained estimates and how to perform efficient statistical inference on the unknown matrix (e.g., constructing a valid and short confidence interval for an unseen entry). This paper takes a substantial step toward addressing such tasks. We develop a simple procedure to compensate for the bias of the widely used convex and nonconvex estimators. The resulting debiased estimators admit nearly precise nonasymptotic distributional characterizations, which in turn enable optimal construction of confidence intervals/regions for, say, the missing entries and the low-rank factors. Our inferential procedures do not require sample splitting, thus avoiding unnecessary loss of data efficiency. As a byproduct, we obtain a sharp characterization of the estimation accuracy of our debiased estimators in both rate and constant. Our debiased estimators are tractable algorithms that provably achieve full statistical efficiency.
KW - Confidence intervals
KW - Convex relaxation
KW - Nonconvex optimization
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1910053116
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1910053116
M3 - Article
C2 - 31666329
AN - SCOPUS:85074886150
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 116
SP - 22931
EP - 22937
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 46
ER -