A Communication-Efficient and Privacy-Aware Distributed Algorithm for Sparse PCA

As a prominent variant of principal component analysis (PCA), sparse PCA attempts to find sparse loading vectors when conducting dimension reduction. This paper aims to calculate sparse PCA through solving an optimization problem pursuing orthogonality and sparsity simultaneously. We propose a splitting and alternating approach, leading to an efficient distributed algorithm, called DAL1, for solving this nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problem. Convergence of DAL1 to stationary points has been rigorously established. Computational experiments demonstrate that, due to its fast convergence in terms of iteration count, DAL1 requires far fewer rounds of communications to reach the prescribed accuracy than those required by existing peer methods. Unlike existing algorithms, there is a relatively small possibility of data leakage for DAL1.