text: Motivated by recent work on stochastic gradient descent methods, we develop two stochastic variants of greedy algorithms for possibly non-convex optimization problems with sparsity constraints. We prove linear convergence in expectation to the solution within a specified tolerance. This generalized framework applies to problems such as sparse signal recovery in compressed sensing, low-rank matrix recovery, and covariance matrix estimation, giving methods with provable convergence guarantees that often outperform their deterministic counterparts. We also analyze the settings where gradients and projections can only be computed approximately, and prove the methods are robust to these approximations. We include many numerical experiments which align with the theoretical analysis and demonstrate these improvements in several different settings.
  @cite_26: Minimizing the rank of a matrix subject to affine constraints is a fundamental problem with many important applications in machine learning and statistics. In this paper we propose a simple and fast algorithm SVP (Singular Value Projection) for rank minimization with affine constraints (ARMP) and show that SVP recovers the minimum rank solution for affine constraints that satisfy the "restricted isometry property" and show robustness of our method to noise. Our results improve upon a recent breakthrough by Recht, Fazel and Parillo (RFP07) and Lee and Bresler (LB09) in three significant ways: 1) our method (SVP) is significantly simpler to analyze and easier to implement, 2) we give recovery guarantees under strictly weaker isometry assumptions 3) we give geometric convergence guarantees for SVP even in presense of noise and, as demonstrated empirically, SVP is significantly faster on real-world and synthetic problems. In addition, we address the practically important problem of low-rank matrix completion (MCP), which can be seen as a special case of ARMP. We empirically demonstrate that our algorithm recovers low-rank incoherent matrices from an almost optimal number of uniformly sampled entries. We make partial progress towards proving exact recovery and provide some intuition for the strong performance of SVP applied to matrix completion by showing a more restricted isometry property. Our algorithm outperforms existing methods, such as those of RFP07,CR08,CT09,CCS08,KOM09,LB09 , for ARMP and the matrix-completion problem by an order of magnitude and is also significantly more robust to noise.
  @cite_32: Hard Thresholding Pursuit (HTP) is an iterative greedy selection procedure for finding sparse solutions of underdetermined linear systems. This method has been shown to have strong theoretical guarantee and impressive numerical performance. In this paper, we generalize HTP from compressive sensing to a generic problem setup of sparsity-constrained convex optimization. The proposed algorithm iterates between a standard gradient descent step and a hard thresholding step with or without debiasing. We prove that our method enjoys the strong guarantees analogous to HTP in terms of rate of convergence and parameter estimation accuracy. Numerical evidences show that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art greedy selection methods in sparse logistic regression and sparse precision matrix estimation tasks.
  @cite_12: Compressed sensing is a technique to sample compressible signals below the Nyquist rate, whilst still allowing near optimal reconstruction of the signal. In this paper we present a theoretical analysis of the iterative hard thresholding algorithm when applied to the compressed sensing recovery problem. We show that the algorithm has the following properties (made more precise in the main text of the paper)
summary: The IHT, another algorithm that motivates our work, is a simple method that begins with an estimation @math and computes the next estimation using the recursion @math where @math is the thresholding operator that sets all but the largest (in magnitude) @math coefficients of its argument to zero. Blumensath and Davies @cite_12 prove that under the RIP, IHT provides a recovery bound comparable to . @cite_26 extends IHT to the matrix recovery. Very recently, @cite_32 proposes the Gradient Hard Thresholding Pursuit (GraHTP), an extension of IHT to solve a special vector case of ).