Matrix denoising: Bayes-optimal estimators via low-degree polynomials

Abstract: We consider the additive version of the matrix denoising problem, where a random symmetric matrix $S$ of size $n$ has to be inferred from the observation of $Y=S+Z$, with $Z$ an independent random matrix modeling a noise. For prior distributions of $S$ and $Z$ that are invariant under conjugation by orthogonal matrices we determine, using results from first and second order free probability theory, the Bayes-optimal (in terms of the mean square error) polynomial estimators of degree at most $D$, asymptotically in $n$, and show that as $D$ increases they converge towards the estimator introduced by Bun, Allez, Bouchaud and Potters in [IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 62, 7475 (2016)]. We conjecture that this optimality holds beyond strictly orthogonally invariant priors, and provide partial evidences of this universality phenomenon when $S$ is an arbitrary Wishart matrix and $Z$ is drawn from the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble, a case motivated by the related extensive rank matrix factorization problem.