Model Agnostic High-Dimensional Error-in-Variable Regression

We consider the problem of high-dimensional error-in-variable regression where we only observe a sparse, noisy version of the covariate data. We propose an algorithm that utilizes matrix estimation (ME) as a key subroutine to de-noise the corrupted data, and then performs ordinary least squares regression. When the ME subroutine is instantiated with hard singular value thresholding (HSVT), our results indicate that if the number of samples scales as $\omega( \rho^{-4} r \log^5 (p))$, then our in- and out-of-sample prediction error decays to $0$ as $p \rightarrow \infty$; $\rho$ represents the fraction of observed data, $r$ is the (approximate) rank of the true covariate matrix, and $p$ is the number of covariates. As an important byproduct of our approach, we demonstrate that HSVT with regression acts as implicit $\ell_0$-regularization since HSVT aims to find a low-rank structure within the covariance matrix. Thus, we can view the sparsity of the estimated parameter as a consequence of the covariate structure rather than a model assumption as is often considered in the literature. Moreover, our non-asymptotic bounds match (up to $\log^4(p)$ factors) the best guaranteed sample complexity results in the literature for algorithms that require precise knowledge of the underlying model; we highlight that our approach is model agnostic. In our analysis, we obtain two technical results of independent interest: first, we provide a simple bound on the spectral norm of random matrices with independent sub-exponential rows with randomly missing entries; second, we bound the max column sum error -- a nonstandard error metric -- for HSVT. Our setting enables us to apply our results to applications such as synthetic control for causal inference, time series analysis, and regression with privacy. It is important to note that the existing inventory of methods is unable to analyze these applications.