Improved Sparse Low-Rank Matrix Estimation

We address the problem of estimating a sparse low-rank matrix from its noisy observation. We propose an objective function consisting of a data-fidelity term and two parameterized non-convex penalty functions. Further, we show how to set the parameters of the non-convex penalty functions, in order to ensure that the objective function is strictly convex. The proposed objective function better estimates sparse low-rank matrices than a convex method which utilizes the sum of the nuclear norm and the $\ell_1$ norm. We derive an algorithm (as an instance of ADMM) to solve the proposed problem, and guarantee its convergence provided the scalar augmented Lagrangian parameter is set appropriately. We demonstrate the proposed method for denoising an audio signal and an adjacency matrix representing protein interactions in the `Escherichia coli' bacteria.

Enhanced Low-Rank Matrix Approximation

This letter proposes to estimate low-rank matrices by formulating a convex optimization problem with non-convex regularization. We employ parameterized non-convex penalty functions to estimate the non-zero singular values more accurately than the nuclear norm. A closed-form solution for the global optimum of the proposed objective function (sum of data fidelity and the non-convex regularizer) is also derived. The solution reduces to singular value thresholding method as a special case. The proposed method is demonstrated for image denoising.

Convex Denoising using Non-Convex Tight Frame Regularization

This paper considers the problem of signal denoising using a sparse tight-frame analysis prior. The L1 norm has been extensively used as a regularizer to promote sparsity; however, it tends to under-estimate non-zero values of the underlying signal. To more accurately estimate non-zero values, we propose the use of a non-convex regularizer, chosen so as to ensure convexity of the objective function. The convexity of the objective function is ensured by constraining the parameter of the non-convex penalty. We use ADMM to obtain a solution and show how to guarantee that ADMM converges to the global optimum of the objective function. We illustrate the proposed method for 1D and 2D signal denoising.