Structured Matrix Learning under Arbitrary Entrywise Dependence and Estimation of Markov Transition Kernel

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chai, Jinhang, Fan, Jianqing
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Chai, Jinhang
Fan, Jianqing
author_facet Chai, Jinhang
Fan, Jianqing
contents The problem of structured matrix estimation has been studied mostly under strong noise dependence assumptions. This paper considers a general framework of noisy low-rank-plus-sparse matrix recovery, where the noise matrix may come from any joint distribution with arbitrary dependence across entries. We propose an incoherent-constrained least-square estimator and prove its tightness both in the sense of deterministic lower bound and matching minimax risks under various noise distributions. To attain this, we establish a novel result asserting that the difference between two arbitrary low-rank incoherent matrices must spread energy out across its entries; in other words, it cannot be too sparse, which sheds light on the structure of incoherent low-rank matrices and may be of independent interest. We then showcase the applications of our framework to several important statistical machine learning problems. In the problem of estimating a structured Markov transition kernel, the proposed method achieves the minimax optimality and the result can be extended to estimating the conditional mean operator, a crucial component in reinforcement learning. The applications to multitask regression and structured covariance estimation are also presented. We propose an alternating minimization algorithm to approximately solve the potentially hard optimization problem. Numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of our method which typically converges in a few steps.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_02520
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structured Matrix Learning under Arbitrary Entrywise Dependence and Estimation of Markov Transition Kernel
Chai, Jinhang
Fan, Jianqing
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
The problem of structured matrix estimation has been studied mostly under strong noise dependence assumptions. This paper considers a general framework of noisy low-rank-plus-sparse matrix recovery, where the noise matrix may come from any joint distribution with arbitrary dependence across entries. We propose an incoherent-constrained least-square estimator and prove its tightness both in the sense of deterministic lower bound and matching minimax risks under various noise distributions. To attain this, we establish a novel result asserting that the difference between two arbitrary low-rank incoherent matrices must spread energy out across its entries; in other words, it cannot be too sparse, which sheds light on the structure of incoherent low-rank matrices and may be of independent interest. We then showcase the applications of our framework to several important statistical machine learning problems. In the problem of estimating a structured Markov transition kernel, the proposed method achieves the minimax optimality and the result can be extended to estimating the conditional mean operator, a crucial component in reinforcement learning. The applications to multitask regression and structured covariance estimation are also presented. We propose an alternating minimization algorithm to approximately solve the potentially hard optimization problem. Numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of our method which typically converges in a few steps.
title Structured Matrix Learning under Arbitrary Entrywise Dependence and Estimation of Markov Transition Kernel
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02520