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Activity Number: 454 - Recommender Systems and Large-Margin Machines: From Statistics Perspectives
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, July 31, 2019 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science
Abstract #306946 Presentation
Title: Flexible Low-Rank Statistical Modeling with Missing Data and Side Information
Author(s): Rahul Mazumder* and William Fithian
Companies: MIT and University of California at Berkeley
Keywords: Low-rank modeling; collaborative filtering; side information; hierarchical Bayesian modeling; nuclear norm; convex optimization
Abstract:

Inspired by applications in recommender systems and collaborative filtering, among others; we explore a general statistical framework for low-rank modeling of matrix-valued data, based on convex optimization with a generalized nuclear norm penalty. We study several related problems: the usual low-rank matrix completion problem with flexible loss functions arising from generalized linear models; reduced-rank regression and multi-task learning; and generalizations when side information about rows and columns is available, in the form of features or smoothing kernels. We show that our approach encompasses maximum a posteriori estimation arising from Bayesian hierarchical modeling with latent factors, and discuss ramifications of the missing-data mechanism in the context of matrix completion. While the above problems can be naturally posed as rank-constrained optimization problems, which are nonconvex and computationally difficult, we show how to relax them via generalized nuclear norm regularization to obtain convex optimization problems. We discuss algorithms drawing inspiration from modern convex optimization methods to address these large scale computational tasks.


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