Efficient and Guaranteed Rank Minimization by Atomic Decomposition

Abstract: Recht, Fazel, and Parrilo provided an analogy between rank minimization and $\ell_0$-norm minimization. Subject to the rank-restricted isometry property, nuclear norm minimization is a guaranteed algorithm for rank minimization. The resulting semidefinite formulation is a convex problem but in practice the algorithms for it do not scale well to large instances. Instead, we explore missing terms in the analogy and propose a new algorithm which is computationally efficient and also has a performance guarantee. The algorithm is based on the atomic decomposition of the matrix variable and extends the idea in the CoSaMP algorithm for $\ell_0$-norm minimization. Combined with the recent fast low rank approximation of matrices based on randomization, the proposed algorithm can efficiently handle large scale rank minimization problems.