Low-rank matrix recovery via efficient schatten p-norm minimization

As an emerging machine learning and information retrieval technique, the matrix completion has been successfully applied to solve many scientific applications, such as collaborative prediction in information retrieval, video completion in computer vision, etc. The matrix completion is to recover a low-rank matrix with a fraction of its entries arbitrarily corrupted. Instead of solving the popularly used trace norm or nuclear norm based objective, we directly minimize the original formulations of trace norm and rank norm. We propose a novel Schatten p-Norm optimization framework that unifies different norm formulations. An efficient algorithm is derived to solve the new objective and followed by the rigorous theoretical proof on the convergence. The previous main solution strategy for this problem requires computing singular value decompositions - a task that requires increasingly cost as matrix sizes and rank increase. Our algorithm has closed form solution in each iteration, hence it converges fast. As a consequence, our algorithm has the capacity of solving large-scale matrix completion problems. Empirical studies on the recommendation system data sets demonstrate the promising performance of our new optimization framework and efficient algorithm.