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arXiv · 1311.2495

The Noisy Power Method: A Meta Algorithm with Applications

Moritz Hardt·Eric Price
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Abstract

We provide a new robust convergence analysis of the well-known power method for computing the dominant singular vectors of a matrix that we call the noisy power method. Our result characterizes the convergence behavior of the algorithm when a significant amount noise is introduced after each matrix-vector multiplication. The noisy power method can be seen as a meta-algorithm that has recently found a number of important applications in a broad range of machine learning problems including alternating minimization for matrix completion, streaming principal component analysis (PCA), and privacy-preserving spectral analysis. Our general analysis subsumes several existing ad-hoc convergence bounds and resolves a number of open problems in multiple applications including streaming PCA and privacy-preserving singular vector computation.

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Moritz Hardt, Eric Price. 2015-02-03. The Noisy Power Method: A Meta Algorithm with Applications. https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2495

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