Exploiting Observation Bias to Improve Matrix Completion

Abstract: We consider a variant of matrix completion where entries are revealed in a biased manner. We wish to understand the extent to which such bias can be exploited in improving predictions. Towards that, we propose a natural model where the observation pattern and outcome of interest are driven by the same set of underlying latent (or unobserved) factors. We devise Mask Nearest Neighbor (MNN), a novel two-stage matrix completion algorithm: first, it recovers (distances between) the latent factors by utilizing matrix estimation for the fully observed noisy binary matrix, corresponding to the observation pattern; second, it utilizes the recovered latent factors as features and sparsely observed noisy outcomes as labels to perform non-parametric supervised learning. Our analysis reveals that MNN enjoys entry-wise finite-sample error rates that are competitive with corresponding supervised learning parametric rates. Despite not having access to the latent factors and dealing with biased observations, MNN exhibits such competitive performance via only exploiting the shared information between the bias and outcomes. Finally, through empirical evaluation using a real-world dataset, we find that with MNN, the estimates have 28x smaller mean squared error compared to traditional matrix completion methods, suggesting the utility of the model and method proposed in this work.