Local low-rank approach to nonlinear-matrix completion

Abstract This paper deals with a problem of matrix completion in which each column vector of the matrix belongs to a low-dimensional differentiable manifold (LDDM), with the target matrix being high or full rank. To solve this problem, algorithms based on polynomial mapping and matrix-rank minimization (MRM) have been proposed; such methods assume that each column vector of the target matrix is generated as a vector in a low-dimensional linear subspace (LDLS) and mapped to a p-th order polynomial, and that the rank of a matrix whose column vectors are d-th monomial features of target column vectors is defficient. However, a large number of columns and observed values are needed to strictly solve the MRM problem using this method when p is large; therefore, this paper proposes a new method for obtaining the solution by minimizing the rank of the submatrix without transforming the target matrix, so as to obtain high estimation accuracy even when the number of columns is small. This method is based on the assumption that an LDDM can be approximated locally as an LDLS to achieve high completion accuracy without transforming the target matrix. Numerical examples show that the proposed method has a higher accuracy than other low-rank approaches.