Iterative Concave Rank Approximation for Recovering Low-Rank Matrices

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for recovery of low-rank matrices from compressed linear measurements. The underlying idea of this algorithm is to closely approximate the rank function with a smooth function of singular values, and then minimize the resulting approximation subject to the linear constraints. The accuracy of the approximation is controlled via a scaling parameter δ, where a smaller δ corresponds to a more accurate fitting. The consequent optimization problem for any finite δ is nonconvex. Therefore, to decrease the risk of ending up in local minima, a series of optimizations is performed, starting with optimizing a rough approximation (a large δ) and followed by successively optimizing finer approximations of the rank with smaller δ´s. To solve the optimization problem for any δ > 0, it is converted to a new program in which the cost is a function of two auxiliary positive semidefinite variables. The paper shows that this new program is concave and applies a majorize-minimize technique to solve it which, in turn, leads to a few convex optimization iterations. This optimization scheme is also equivalent to a reweighted Nuclear Norm Minimization (NNM). For any δ > 0, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the exact recovery which are weaker than those corresponding to NNM. On the numerical side, the proposed algorithm is compared to NNM and a reweighted NNM in solving affine rank minimization and matrix completion problems showing its considerable and consistent superiority in terms of success rate.