Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper considers the theoretical properties of
online updating of a "robust" PCA. Unlike traditional RPCA the proposed
method does not learn the usual decomposition of the data into low-rank
and sparse components but instead outliers are handled by accepting
observations into the estimate of the covariance matrix proportional to
their variance along the previously estimated PCA directions and scaling
the accepted observations by this probability.
The proposed
approach seems novel and certainly looks to be simpler than other
approaches solving the same problem which are referred to in the paper.
However it would have been nice to see a comparison of these methods.
The technical contribution of the paper seems sound and
illuminating however the important question remains: how likely is it that
the initial condition on H(w^0) is satisfied. This also seems to limit the
usefulness of the method in real applications since in the experiments the
authors initialise with PCA computed with the known outliers removed --
perhaps RPCA or similar could be used to get the initial estimate?
It also seems like in high dimensions, there might be issues due
to high dimensionality/low sample size when computing the initial
estimates.
There are a few other questions I am left with:
What happens when the concept changes i.e. when the underlying data
generating process changes?
I have also noticed some possibly
minor mistakes/typos. In section 3.1 some random variable \mu is
mentioned but it is never defined and seemingly not mentioned again. Is
this a typo?
The sentence introducing \lambda is quite strange, it
implies that \lambda has already been defined but in fact it has not.
In several places "affect" is mixed up with "effect".
Captions in Figs 2 and 3 are wrong. They should be number of
batches.
It would have been instructive to compare the results
with batch mode RPCA and also report on timings to get an idea if there is
a significant speedup. Q2: Please summarize your review
in 1-2 sentences
I think the work represents a nice contribution
however some of the introductory technical exposition is quite sloppy and
needs to be sorted out. The experiments which are presented show promising
results but it does feel like they are incomplete. Submitted
by Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This work presents an algorithm for computing
principal components in an online setting when the data are corrupted by
outliers (a subset of the data come from another, arbitrary distribution).
The authors give a procedure for recovering the principal components and
prove convergence in the limit. The paper is technically sound, clearly
written, and addresses an important issue in online recovery of
significant directions in high-dimensional data. I have only a few
questions, one regarding the initial conditions, the other about notation.
First, it seems that a good starting point is required for the
algorithm. Section 3.2 mentions the requirements of the initial condition,
Theorem 1 states them explicitly, but the consequences of this are not
discussed in the text. Furthermore, the simulations are initialized using
uncorrupted samples. How would this work in practice? What are the
consequences of chosing an initial set of vectors closer to the outliers
than to the true principal components? This seems important enough to
warrant a discussion.
Definition 1: is \Gamma_0 an upper bound on
how far the outliers deviate from the PC subspace? Shouldn't this sum, and
other instances, be a projection (normalized inner product)? I am also
confused about the first equation in Section 4. I expect the E.V. of the
*first* principal component w_1 to be 1, while the sum over all principal
components will be the sum of the singular values of A.
Signal to
noise s is not defined in the text.
Q2: Please
summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
This is a technically sound paper, with a mostly clear
exposition (save for a couple items that confused this reviewer), and
results on simulated data that support the claims (but seem to be based on
a strong assumption regarding initial conditions).
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The authors propose a robust PCA algorithm that is
online and has some optimality properties with respect to outliers in the
data. This is the first algorithm/analysis for online RPCA with
theoretical guarantees. This is a good paper. The background is solid, the
analysis is clear and reasonable. The two questions I have are 1) why
the E.V. is used and not other distance metrics between subspaces, there
are a variety and I suspect the results will hold very similarly for all
these cases. 2) what about the dimension d, how does one select this
Also, the algorithm seems similar to follow the lazy leader type
of algorithms. Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This seems to be the first algorithm/analysis for
online RPCA with theoretical guarantees, given outliers.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank all reviewers for their constructive
suggestions and insightful comments. The point-to-point replies are as
follows.
To reviewer 6
Q1. It would be nice to see a
comparison of other approaches referred to in the paper.
A1.
Thanks for the suggestion. We have discussed the main limitations of
related approaches in Sec.2. And we will provide the experimental
comparison with [15] and [20] in the future work.
Q2. How likely
the initial condition is satisfied, perhaps RPCA could be used to get the
initial estimate?
A2. Yes, we agree with that. Initial estimate
can be obtained by applying batch RPCA or HRPCA on a small subset of the
data. These batch methods are able to provide initial estimate with
performance guarantee, which may satisfy the initial condition. In real
applications, we can first perform batch RPCA to get an initial estimate
and then apply online RPCA to process the large scale data efficiently.
The motivation of this work is to handle the case where the
samples outnumber the capacity of the computer (both in computation and in
particular in storage). Due to the resource limitation, batch RPCA can
only be performed on a subset of samples and cannot make full use of the
whole collected data. In contrast, our method provides a way to break the
bottleneck from computer capacity to make use of the entire data set,
which is of use for the big-data regime.
Q3. It also seems like in
high dimensions, there might be issues due to high dimensionality/low
sample size when computing the initial estimates.
A3. We agree.
However, as mentioned in the response to Q2, we can apply the batch HRPCA
on a subset of the data to get the initial estimate. HRPCA is particularly
designed for the high-dimensional regime (see Xu et al, TIT, 2013). It can
provide satisfactory initial estimate.
Q4. What happens when the
concept changes i.e. when the underlying data generating process changes?
A4. Online RPCA is able to dynamically adapt to the changing data
generating process. If the process does not change too fast to follow,
online RPCA can obtain dynamic and good PCs estimation. This is another
advantage of online RPCA compared with static batch RPCA.
Q5. Some
random variable \mu is mentioned but it is never defined and mentioned
again.
A5. Sorry for causing the confusion. As mentioned in line
118, \mu denotes the distribution of signal x. We will give the explicit
definition of \mu in the revision.
Q6. The sentence introducing
\lambda is quite strange….
A6. Sorry for missing the formal
definition. \lambda denotes the fraction of outliers in the samples. We
will add this definition.
Q7. It would have been instructive to
compare the results with batch RPCA and report on timings to see if there
is a significant speedup.
A7. Thanks for the suggestion. In this
paper, we are concerned more about the *memory cost* when dealing with
large-scale dataset, as mentioned in A2. We will provide the performance
of batch RPCA as reference, and report the time cost in the revision.
Q8. Captions in Fig 2 and 3 should be number of batches.
A8. Thanks for pointing out the typo. We will revise them.
To reviewer 7
Q1. The simulations are initialized using
uncorrupted samples. How would this work in practice? What is the
correspondence of choosing an initial set of vectors closer to the
outliers than true PCs?
A1. The initial estimate can be obtained
by applying a batch RPCA or HRPCA on a small subset of the data. These
batch methods are able to provide initial estimate with performance
guarantee, which may satisfy the required initial condition. Please refer
to A2 to Reviewer 6 for discussion.
If the initial vectors closer
to outliers, the result depends on which (outliers or true samples)
contribute more to the covariance matrix, i.e. the initial condition. If
the initial condition is satisfied, the final performance is still lower
bounded. If not, we cannot obtain guarantee on the final performance. We
will provide discussions on this point.
Q2. Is \Gamma_0 an upper
bound on how far the outliers deviate from the PC subspace? Shouldn’t this
sum be a projection (normalized inner product)?
A2. Indeed
\Gamma_0 is the projection. Since we assume that Pcs estimation w and
outliers o are all *normalized* (see Alg.1 step 1)-a) where all the
samples are L2-normalized), we directly use inner product in the
definition of \Gamma_0. We will clarify this point
Q3. Confused by
the first equation in section 4. A3. Sorry for the typo causing
confusion. We meant to say that the nuclear norm of A is scaled to be 1.
Thus the E.V. of optimal PCs is 1. We will clarify it.
Q4. Signal
to noise s is not defined in the text. A4. We will add the definition
of SNR in the further version.
To reviewer 8
Q1. Why the
E.V. is used and not other distance metrics? I suspect the results will
hold very similarly.
A1. We agree with that for other distance
metric, the results will similarly hold. Here, the reason for using E.V.
metric is that E.V. is the most natural way to evaluate how good PCs are –
note that in noiseless case PCA is directly maximizing it. Subspace angles
may not be a good metric. For example, if there are two true PCs, one of
them has larger EV than the other, then if the solutions deviate the
correct one - deviating from the second PC should be considered better
than deviating from the first. This can be captured via E.V., but not
subspace angles.
Q2. How does one select the dimension d? A2.
It is generally pre-defined by the user of the algorithm based on certain
estimation method or some prior knowledge, similar to implementing the
standard PCA. When such knowledge is not available, trial and error on
different d seems necessary.
Q3. The algorithm seems similar to
follow the lazy leader type of algorithms.
A3. We will add a
comment and reference concerning lazy leaders type of algorithms.
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