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Main Authors: Even, Bertrand, Giraud, Christophe, Verzelen, Nicolas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13647
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author Even, Bertrand
Giraud, Christophe
Verzelen, Nicolas
author_facet Even, Bertrand
Giraud, Christophe
Verzelen, Nicolas
contents In many high-dimensional problems, like sparse-PCA, planted clique, or clustering, the best known algorithms with polynomial time complexity fail to reach the statistical performance provably achievable by algorithms free of computational constraints. This observation has given rise to the conjecture of the existence, for some problems, of gaps -- so called statistical-computational gaps -- between the best possible statistical performance achievable without computational constraints, and the best performance achievable with poly-time algorithms. A powerful approach to assess the best performance achievable in poly-time is to investigate the best performance achievable by polynomials with low-degree. We build on the seminal paper of Schramm and Wein (2022) and propose a new scheme to derive lower bounds on the performance of low-degree polynomials in some latent space models. By better leveraging the latent structures, we obtain new and sharper results, with simplified proofs. We then instantiate our scheme to provide computational lower bounds for the problems of clustering, sparse clustering, and biclustering. We also prove matching upper-bounds and some additional statistical results, in order to provide a comprehensive description of the statistical-computational gaps occurring in these three problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_13647
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Computational lower bounds in latent models: clustering, sparse-clustering, biclustering
Even, Bertrand
Giraud, Christophe
Verzelen, Nicolas
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
62H30, 68Q17
In many high-dimensional problems, like sparse-PCA, planted clique, or clustering, the best known algorithms with polynomial time complexity fail to reach the statistical performance provably achievable by algorithms free of computational constraints. This observation has given rise to the conjecture of the existence, for some problems, of gaps -- so called statistical-computational gaps -- between the best possible statistical performance achievable without computational constraints, and the best performance achievable with poly-time algorithms. A powerful approach to assess the best performance achievable in poly-time is to investigate the best performance achievable by polynomials with low-degree. We build on the seminal paper of Schramm and Wein (2022) and propose a new scheme to derive lower bounds on the performance of low-degree polynomials in some latent space models. By better leveraging the latent structures, we obtain new and sharper results, with simplified proofs. We then instantiate our scheme to provide computational lower bounds for the problems of clustering, sparse clustering, and biclustering. We also prove matching upper-bounds and some additional statistical results, in order to provide a comprehensive description of the statistical-computational gaps occurring in these three problems.
title Computational lower bounds in latent models: clustering, sparse-clustering, biclustering
topic Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
62H30, 68Q17
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13647