Rémi Gribonval

Titouan Vayer, Etienne Lasalle, Rémi Gribonval et al.

We consider the problem of learning a graph modeling the statistical relations of the $d$ variables from a dataset with $n$ samples $X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$. Standard approaches amount to searching for a precision matrix $Θ$ representative of a Gaussian graphical model that adequately explains the data. However, most maximum likelihood-based estimators usually require storing the $d^{2}$ values of the empirical covariance matrix, which can become prohibitive in a high-dimensional setting. In this work, we adopt a compressive viewpoint and aim to estimate a sparse $Θ$ from a \emph{sketch} of the data, i.e. a low-dimensional vector of size $m \ll d^{2}$ carefully designed from $X$ using non-linear random features. Under certain assumptions on the spectrum of $Θ$ (or its condition number), we show that it is possible to estimate it from a sketch of size $m=Ω\left((d+2k)\log(d)\right)$ where $k$ is the maximal number of edges of the underlying graph. These information-theoretic guarantees are inspired by compressed sensing theory and involve restricted isometry properties and instance optimal decoders. We investigate the possibility of achieving practical recovery with an iterative algorithm based on the graphical lasso, viewed as a specific denoiser. We compare our approach and graphical lasso on synthetic datasets, demonstrating its favorable performance even when the dataset is compressed.

Léon Zheng, Elisa Riccietti, Rémi Gribonval

Sparse matrix factorization is the problem of approximating a matrix $\mathbf{Z}$ by a product of $J$ sparse factors $\mathbf{X}^{(J)} \mathbf{X}^{(J-1)} \ldots \mathbf{X}^{(1)}$. This paper focuses on identifiability issues that appear in this problem, in view of better understanding under which sparsity constraints the problem is well-posed. We give conditions under which the problem of factorizing a matrix into \emph{two} sparse factors admits a unique solution, up to unavoidable permutation and scaling equivalences. Our general framework considers an arbitrary family of prescribed sparsity patterns, allowing us to capture more structured notions of sparsity than simply the count of nonzero entries. These conditions are shown to be related to essential uniqueness of exact matrix decomposition into a sum of rank-one matrices, with structured sparsity constraints. In particular, in the case of fixed-support sparse matrix factorization, we give a general sufficient condition for identifiability based on rank-one matrix completability, and we derive from it a completion algorithm that can verify if this sufficient condition is satisfied, and recover the entries in the two sparse factors if this is the case. A companion paper further exploits these conditions to derive identifiability properties and theoretically sound factorization methods for multi-layer sparse matrix factorization with support constraints associated to some well-known fast transforms such as the Hadamard or the Discrete Fourier Transforms.