# NIPS Proceedingsβ

## Sum-of-Squares Lower Bounds for Sparse PCA

A note about reviews: "heavy" review comments were provided by reviewers in the program committee as part of the evaluation process for NIPS 2015, along with posted responses during the author feedback period. Numerical scores from both "heavy" and "light" reviewers are not provided in the review link below.

[PDF] [BibTeX] [Supplemental] [Reviews]

### Abstract

This paper establishes a statistical versus computational trade-offfor solving a basic high-dimensional machine learning problem via a basic convex relaxation method. Specifically, we consider the {\em Sparse Principal Component Analysis} (Sparse PCA) problem, and the family of {\em Sum-of-Squares} (SoS, aka Lasserre/Parillo) convex relaxations. It was well known that in large dimension $p$, a planted $k$-sparse unit vector can be {\em in principle} detected using only $n \approx k\log p$ (Gaussian or Bernoulli) samples, but all {\em efficient} (polynomial time) algorithms known require $n \approx k^2$ samples. It was also known that this quadratic gap cannot be improved by the the most basic {\em semi-definite} (SDP, aka spectral) relaxation, equivalent to a degree-2 SoS algorithms. Here we prove that also degree-4 SoS algorithms cannot improve this quadratic gap. This average-case lower bound adds to the small collection of hardness results in machine learning for this powerful family of convex relaxation algorithms. Moreover, our design of moments (or pseudo-expectations'') for this lower bound is quite different than previous lower bounds. Establishing lower bounds for higher degree SoS algorithms for remains a challenging problem.