Phuc Tran

Anay Mehrotra, Phuc Tran, Van H. Vu et al.

A central goal of modern causal inference is estimating heterogeneous treatment effects to answer questions like "how does an intervention affect each unit," rather than only on average. We study this problem with panel-data where we observe $n$ units across $m$ times under unknown, non-uniform treatment assignments. The data in this setting is naturally represented as a matrix of all unit--time treatment effects. Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects can then be expressed as obtaining a good estimation of each row's average in this matrix. This allows us to formulate the problem as matrix completion, which can be solved under natural low-rankness assumptions. However, existing matrix-completion guarantees are not powerful enough to get meaningful bounds for the per-row guarantee required for estimating the heterogeneous treatment effect; roughly speaking, they are only useful for estimating average treatment effect bounds, as also illustrated in a recent line of work. We give a simple, computationally efficient estimator that, without knowledge of the propensities and under standard low-rankness and regularity assumptions, achieves a row-wise $\ell_2$ error of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{\frac{1}{n} + \frac{n}{m^2}})$. Technically, our analysis establishes the first sharp row-wise $\ell_2$-perturbation bound for low-rank approximation, complementing existing spectral-, Frobenius-, and entrywise perturbation theory.

Phuc Tran, Van Vu

Let $A$ be an $m \times n$ matrix with rank $r$ and spectral decomposition $A = \sum_{i=1}^r σ_i u_i v_i^\top,$ where $σ_i$ are its singular values, ordered decreasingly, and $u_i, v_i$ are the corresponding left and right singular vectors. For a parameter $1 \le p \le r$, $A_p := \sum_{i=1}^p σ_i u_i v_i^\top$ is the best rank $p$ approximation of $A$. In practice, one often chooses $p$ to be small, leading to the commonly used phrase "low-rank approximation". Low-rank approximation plays a central role in data science because it can substantially reduce the dimensionality of the original data, the matrix $A$. For a large data matrix $A$, one typically computes a rank-$p$ approximation $A_p$ for a suitably chosen small $p$, stores $A_p$, and uses it as input for further computations. The reduced dimension of $A_p$ enables faster computations and significant data compression. In practice, noise is inevitable. We often have access only to noisy data $\tilde A = A + E$, where $E$ represents the noise. Consequently, the low-rank approximation used as input in many downstream tasks is $\tilde A_p$, the best rank $p$ approximation of $\tilde A$, rather than $A_p$. Therefore, it is natural and important to estimate the error $ \| \tilde A_p - A_p \|$. This error plays a critical role in estimating the accuracy of the output of any process involving a low-rank approximation of noisy input. In this paper, we develop a new method (based on contour analysis) to bound $\| \tilde A_p - A_p \|$. With this method, we can exploit new parameters that measure the skewness between the noise matrix $E$ and the singular vectors of $A$, avoiding the worst-case analysis used in traditional approaches. In many settings, we obtain notable quantitative improvements compared to classical approaches (using the Eckart-Young-Mirsky theorem or the Davis-Kahan theorem).

Phuc Tran, Van Vu

Let $A$ be a full ranked $ n\times n$ matrix, with singular values $σ_1 (A) \ge \dots \ge σ_n (A) >0$. The condition number $κ(A):= σ_1(A)/σ_n(A)=\|A\|\cdot \|A\|^{-1}$ is a key parameter in the analysis of algorithms taking $A$ as input. In practice, matrices (representing real data) are often perturbed by noise. Technically speaking, the real input would be a noisy variant $\tilde A =A +E$ of $A$, where $E$ represents the noise. The condition number $κ(\tilde A)$ will be used instead of $κ(A)$. Thus, it is of importance to measure the impact of noise on the condition number. In this paper, we focus on the case when the noise is random. We introduce the notion of regional stability, via which we design a new framework to estimate the perturbation of the extremal singular values and the condition number of a matrix. Our framework allows us to bound the perturbation of singular values through the perturbation of singular spaces. We then bound the latter using a novel contour analysis argument, which, as a co-product, provides an improved version of the classical Davis-Kahan theorem in many settings. Our new estimates concerning the least singular value $σ_n(A)$ complement well-known results in this area, and are more favorable in the case when the ground matrix $A$ is large compared to the noise matrix $E$.

Phuc Tran, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi, Van H. Vu

A central challenge in machine learning is to understand how noise or measurement errors affect low-rank approximations, particularly in the spectral norm. This question is especially important in differentially private low-rank approximation, where one aims to preserve the top-$p$ structure of a data-derived matrix while ensuring privacy. Prior work often analyzes Frobenius norm error or changes in reconstruction quality, but these metrics can over- or under-estimate true subspace distortion. The spectral norm, by contrast, captures worst-case directional error and provides the strongest utility guarantees. We establish new high-probability spectral-norm perturbation bounds for symmetric matrices that refine the classical Eckart--Young--Mirsky theorem and explicitly capture interactions between a matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ and an arbitrary symmetric perturbation $E$. Under mild eigengap and norm conditions, our bounds yield sharp estimates for $\|(A + E)_p - A_p\|$, where $A_p$ is the best rank-$p$ approximation of $A$, with improvements of up to a factor of $\sqrt{n}$. As an application, we derive improved utility guarantees for differentially private PCA, resolving an open problem in the literature. Our analysis relies on a novel contour bootstrapping method from complex analysis and extends it to a broad class of spectral functionals, including polynomials and matrix exponentials. Empirical results on real-world datasets confirm that our bounds closely track the actual spectral error under diverse perturbation regimes.

Phuc Tran, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

Low-rank pseudoinverses are widely used to approximate matrix inverses in scalable machine learning, optimization, and scientific computing. However, real-world matrices are often observed with noise, arising from sampling, sketching, and quantization. The spectral-norm robustness of low-rank inverse approximations remains poorly understood. We systematically study the spectral-norm error $\| (\tilde{A}^{-1})_p - A_p^{-1} \|$ for an $n\times n$ symmetric matrix $A$, where $A_p^{-1}$ denotes the best rank-\(p\) approximation of $A^{-1}$, and $\tilde{A} = A + E$ is a noisy observation. Under mild assumptions on the noise, we derive sharp non-asymptotic perturbation bounds that reveal how the error scales with the eigengap, spectral decay, and noise alignment with low-curvature directions of $A$. Our analysis introduces a novel application of contour integral techniques to the \emph{non-entire} function $f(z) = 1/z$, yielding bounds that improve over naive adaptations of classical full-inverse bounds by up to a factor of $\sqrt{n}$. Empirically, our bounds closely track the true perturbation error across a variety of real-world and synthetic matrices, while estimates based on classical results tend to significantly overpredict. These findings offer practical, spectrum-aware guarantees for low-rank inverse approximations in noisy computational environments.