Nuclear Norm-Regularized Bayesian Matrix Completion

Abstract: Matrix completion, the problem of estimating missing entries in a matrix from noisily observed ones, underlies a diverse array of problems such as recommender systems and counterfactual outcome estimation in panel data. Many algorithms address the problem using regularized least squares, often with the nuclear norm as a regularizer, but this method yields a point estimate with no built-in uncertainty quantification. A Bayesian formulation is a natural alternative, and if the noise variance is known, the nuclear norm-based prior yields a log-concave posterior. Unfortunately, in practice, the noise variance will not be known a priori, so for a fully Bayesian approach, a prior must be imposed on it. We give the first sampler for this model with an explicit non-asymptotic guarantee: polynomial in the matrix dimensions and in the reciprocal of the target accuracy. Our technique is to discretize the distribution of the noise precision onto a grid and build a categorical posterior via thermodynamic integration. This extension is not specific to matrix completion and may be useful in other non-log-concave sampling problems where the non-log-concavity is restricted to a single variable and the joint distribution of the remaining variables is nonsmooth. Our contribution is a feasibility result: we show that a polynomial-time Bayesian sampler for this model exists at all, and the resulting complexity, while polynomial, is not intended as a deployable algorithm at current problem scales.