We study the problem of robust subspace recovery (RSR) in the presence of adversarial outliers. That is, we seek a subspace that contains a large portion of a dataset when some fraction of the data points are arbitrarily corrupted. We first examine a theoretical estimator that is intractable to calculate and use it to derive information-theoretic bounds of exact recovery. We then propose two tractable estimators: a variant of RANSAC and a simple relaxation of the theoretical estimator. The two estimators are fast to compute and achieve state-of-the-art theoretical performance in a noiseless RSR setting with adversarial outliers. The former estimator achieves better theoretical guarantees in the noiseless case, while the latter estimator is robust to small noise, and its guarantees significantly improve with non-adversarial models of outliers. We give a complete comparison of guarantees for the adversarial RSR problem, as well as a short discussion on the estimation of affine subspaces.
An example of a method with guarantees for general position outliers is RandomizedFind. It searches for linearly dependent @math -subsets of points, and thus linearly dependent outliers present a problem @cite_2 . Another similar method is a RANSAC-type algorithm that sub-samples @math points until a linearly dependent subset is found @cite_9 . This procedure does not work with adversarial outliers for a similar reason. Indeed, suppose that outliers all lie on a 1-dimensional subspace. Then, if one samples a subset with just two of these outliers, one would return a corrupted estimate of the subspace. We will later discuss modifications of the RANSAC algorithm that work for these degenerate cases up to certain limits.
@cite_9 @cite_2
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We consider the RANSAC algorithm in the context of subspace recovery and subspace clustering. We derive some theory and perform some numerical experiments. We also draw some correspondences with the methods of Hardt and Moitra (2013) and Chen and Lerman (2009b). We consider a fundamental problem in unsupervised learning called subspace recovery : given a collection of m points in R, if many but not necessarily all of these points are contained in a d-dimensional subspace T can we find it? The points contained in T are called inliers and the remaining points are outliers. This problem has received considerable attention in computer science and in statistics. Yet efficient algorithms from computer science are not robust to adversarial outliers, and the estimators from robust statistics are hard to compute in high dimensions. This is a serious and persistent issue not just in this application, but for many other problems in unsupervised learning. Are there algorithms for subspace recovery that are both robust to outliers and efficient? We give an algorithm that finds T when it contains more than a d n fraction of the points. Hence, for say d = n 2 this estimator is both easy to compute and well-behaved when there are a constant fraction of outliers. We prove that it is small set expansion hard to find T when the fraction of errors is any larger, thus giving evidence that our estimator is an optimal compromise between efficiency and robustness. In fact, this basic problem has a surprising number of connections to other areas including small set expansion, matroid theory and functional analysis that we make use of here.