Convex Total Least Squares
This addresses a practical limitation in fields like computer vision and biology by enabling more accurate regression under complex noise conditions, though it is an incremental improvement over existing TLS methods.
The paper tackles the total least squares (TLS) problem with realistic noise structures like varying measurement noise or outliers, which cannot be solved by standard SVD methods, and develops a convex relaxation approach using re-weighted nuclear norm that achieves better accuracy than non-convex solvers on challenging structured TLS problems.
We study the total least squares (TLS) problem that generalizes least squares regression by allowing measurement errors in both dependent and independent variables. TLS is widely used in applied fields including computer vision, system identification and econometrics. The special case when all dependent and independent variables have the same level of uncorrelated Gaussian noise, known as ordinary TLS, can be solved by singular value decomposition (SVD). However, SVD cannot solve many important practical TLS problems with realistic noise structure, such as having varying measurement noise, known structure on the errors, or large outliers requiring robust error-norms. To solve such problems, we develop convex relaxation approaches for a general class of structured TLS (STLS). We show both theoretically and experimentally, that while the plain nuclear norm relaxation incurs large approximation errors for STLS, the re-weighted nuclear norm approach is very effective, and achieves better accuracy on challenging STLS problems than popular non-convex solvers. We describe a fast solution based on augmented Lagrangian formulation, and apply our approach to an important class of biological problems that use population average measurements to infer cell-type and physiological-state specific expression levels that are very hard to measure directly.