No Arabic abstract
Multiresolution Matrix Factorization (MMF) was recently introduced as an alternative to the dominant low-rank paradigm in order to capture structure in matrices at multiple different scales. Using ideas from multiresolution analysis (MRA), MMF teased out hierarchical structure in symmetric matrices by constructing a sequence of wavelet bases. While effective for such matrices, there is plenty of data that is more naturally represented as nonsymmetric matrices (e.g. directed graphs), but nevertheless has similar hierarchical structure. In this paper, we explore techniques for extending MMF to any square matrix. We validate our approach on numerous matrix compression tasks, demonstrating its efficacy compared to low-rank methods. Moreover, we also show that a combined low-rank and MMF approach, which amounts to removing a small global-scale component of the matrix and then extracting hierarchical structure from the residual, is even more effective than each of the two complementary methods for matrix compression.
Matrix factorization techniques compute low-rank product approximations of high dimensional data matrices and as a result, are often employed in recommender systems and collaborative filtering applications. However, many algorithms for this task utilize an exact least-squares solver whose computation is time consuming and memory-expensive. In this paper we discuss and test a block Kaczmarz solver that replaces the least-squares subroutine in the common alternating scheme for matrix factorization. This variant trades a small increase in factorization error for significantly faster algorithmic performance. In doing so we find block sizes that produce a solution comparable to that of the least-squares solver for only a fraction of the runtime and working memory requirement.
Existing tensor completion formulation mostly relies on partial observations from a single tensor. However, tensors extracted from real-world data are often more complex due to: (i) Partial observation: Only a small subset (e.g., 5%) of tensor elements are available. (ii) Coarse observation: Some tensor modes only present coarse and aggregated patterns (e.g., monthly summary instead of daily reports). In this paper, we are given a subset of the tensor and some aggregated/coarse observations (along one or more modes) and seek to recover the original fine-granular tensor with low-rank factorization. We formulate a coupled tensor completion problem and propose an efficient Multi-resolution Tensor Completion model (MTC) to solve the problem. Our MTC model explores tensor mode properties and leverages the hierarchy of resolutions to recursively initialize an optimization setup, and optimizes on the coupled system using alternating least squares. MTC ensures low computational and space complexity. We evaluate our model on two COVID-19 related spatio-temporal tensors. The experiments show that MTC could provide 65.20% and 75.79% percentage of fitness (PoF) in tensor completion with only 5% fine granular observations, which is 27.96% relative improvement over the best baseline. To evaluate the learned low-rank factors, we also design a tensor prediction task for daily and cumulative disease case predictions, where MTC achieves 50% in PoF and 30% relative improvements over the best baseline.
This paper is concerned with improving the empirical convergence speed of block-coordinate descent algorithms for approximate nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF). We propose an extrapolation strategy in-between block updates, referred to as heuristic extrapolation with restarts (HER). HER significantly accelerates the empirical convergence speed of most existing block-coordinate algorithms for dense NTF, in particular for challenging computational scenarios, while requiring a negligible additional computational budget.
We study the asymmetric low-rank factorization problem: [min_{mathbf{U} in mathbb{R}^{m times d}, mathbf{V} in mathbb{R}^{n times d}} frac{1}{2}|mathbf{U}mathbf{V}^top -mathbf{Sigma}|_F^2] where $mathbf{Sigma}$ is a given matrix of size $m times n$ and rank $d$. This is a canonical problem that admits two difficulties in optimization: 1) non-convexity and 2) non-smoothness (due to unbalancedness of $mathbf{U}$ and $mathbf{V}$). This is also a prototype for more complex problems such as asymmetric matrix sensing and matrix completion. Despite being non-convex and non-smooth, it has been observed empirically that the randomly initialized gradient descent algorithm can solve this problem in polynomial time. Existing theories to explain this phenomenon all require artificial modifications of the algorithm, such as adding noise in each iteration and adding a balancing regularizer to balance the $mathbf{U}$ and $mathbf{V}$. This paper presents the first proof that shows randomly initialized gradient descent converges to a global minimum of the asymmetric low-rank factorization problem with a polynomial rate. For the proof, we develop 1) a new symmetrization technique to capture the magnitudes of the symmetry and asymmetry, and 2) a quantitative perturbation analysis to approximate matrix derivatives. We believe both are useful for other related non-convex problems.
We introduce a randomized algorithm, namely RCHOL, to construct an approximate Cholesky factorization for a given Laplacian matrix (a.k.a., graph Laplacian). From a graph perspective, the exact Cholesky factorization introduces a clique in the underlying graph after eliminating a row/column. By randomization, RCHOL only retains a sparse subset of the edges in the clique using a random sampling developed by Spielman and Kyng. We prove RCHOL is breakdown-free and apply it to solving large sparse linear systems with symmetric diagonally dominant matrices. In addition, we parallelize RCHOL based on the nested dissection ordering for shared-memory machines. We report numerical experiments that demonstrate the robustness and the scalability of RCHOL. For example, our parallel code scaled up to 64 threads on a single node for solving the 3D Poisson equation, discretized with the 7-point stencil on a $1024times 1024 times 1024$ grid, a problem that has one billion unknowns.