A Direct Formulation for Sparse PCA Using Semidefinite Programming

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17 (NIPS 2004)

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Authors

Alexandre D'aspremont, Laurent Ghaoui, Michael Jordan, Gert Lanckriet

Abstract

We examine the problem of approximating, in the Frobenius-norm sense, a positive, semidefinite symmetric matrix by a rank-one matrix, with an upper bound on the cardinality of its eigenvector. The problem arises in the decomposition of a covariance matrix into sparse factors, and has wide applications ranging from biology to finance. We use a modifica- tion of the classical variational representation of the largest eigenvalue of a symmetric matrix, where cardinality is constrained, and derive a semidefinite programming based relaxation for our problem.