Low-Rank Matrix Completion via Nonconvex Rank Approximation for IoT Network Localization

Localizing a cloud of points from noisy measurements of a subset of pairwise distances has applications in various areas, such as sensor network localization and reconstruction of protein conformations from NMR measurements. In [1], Drineas et al. proposed a natural two-stage approach, named SVD-MDS, for this purpose. This approach consists of a low-rank matrix completion algorithm, named SVD-Reconstruct, to estimate random missing distances, and the classic multidimensional scaling (MDS) method to estimate the positions of nodes. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis for this method. More specifically, we first establish error bounds for Euclidean distance matrix (EDM) completion in both expectation and tail forms. Utilizing these results, we then derive the error bound for the recovered positions of nodes. In order to assess the performance of SVD-Reconstruct, we present the minimax lower bound of the zero-diagonal, symmetric, low-rank matrix completion problem by Fano's method. This result reveals that when the noise level is low, the SVD-Reconstruct approach for Euclidean distance matrix completion is suboptimal in the minimax sense; when the noise level is high, SVD-Reconstruct can achieve the optimal rate up to a constant factor.

In remote sensing systems, exact knowledge of the sensor locations is critical for generating focused images. In order to accurately locate misplaced or perturbed sensors from their received signal data, we proposed a robust sensor localization method based on low-rank Euclidean distance matrix (EDM) reconstruction. To this end, an EDM of sensors and objects under detection is defined and partially initialized by computing distances between the inaccurate sensor locations and distances from the sensors to the objects using signal coherence analysis. We then decompose the noisy EDM with missing entries into a low-rank EDM corresponding to true sensor locations and a sparse matrix of distance errors by solving a constrained optimization problem using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We verify our method with simulations on a uniform linear array with unknown perturbations up to several wavelengths.

One of the main challenges faced by wireless sensor network (WSN) localization is the positioning accuracy of the WSN node. The existing algorithms are arduous to use for dealing with the pulse noise that is universal and ineluctable in practical considerations, resulting in lower positioning accuracy. Aimed at this problem and introducing Bregman divergence, we propose in this paper a novel WSN localization algorithm via matrix completion (LBDMC). Based on the natural low-rank character of the Euclidean Distance Matrix (EDM), the problem of EDM recovery is formulated as an issue of matrix completion in a noisy environment. A regularized matrix completion model is established, smoothing the pulse noise by leveraging -norm and the multivariate function Bregman divergence is defined to solve the model to obtain the EDM estimator. Furthermore, node localization is available based on the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) method. Multi-faceted comparison experiments with existing algorithms, under a variety of noise conditions, demonstrate the superiority of LBDMC to other algorithms regarding positioning accuracy and robustness, while ensuring high efficiency. Notably, the mean localization error of LBDMC is about ten times smaller than that of other algorithms when the sampling rate reaches a certain level, such as >30%.

Wigner distribution deconvolution (WDD) is a decades-old method for recovering phase from intensity measurements. Although the technique offers an elegant linear solution to the quadratic phase retrieval problem, it has seen limited adoption due to its high computational/memory requirements and the fact that the technique often exhibits high noise sensitivity. Here, we propose a method for noise suppression in WDD via low-rank noisy matrix completion. Our technique exploits the redundancy of an object's phase space to denoise its WDD reconstruction. We show in model calculations that our technique outperforms other WDD algorithms as well as modern iterative methods for phase retrieval such as ptychography. Our results suggest that a class of phase retrieval techniques relying on regularized direct inversion of ptychographic datasets (instead of iterative reconstruction techniques) can provide accurate quantitative phase information in the presence of high levels of noise.

Accurate and sufficient node location information is crucial for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications. However, the existing range-based localization methods often suffer from incomplete and detorted range measurements. To address this issue, some methods based on low-rank matrix recovery have been proposed, which usually assume noises follow single Gaussian distribution or/and single Laplacian distribution, and thus cannot handle the case with wider noise distributions beyond Gaussian and Laplacian ones. In this paper, a novel Anomaly-aware Node Localization (ANLoC) method is proposed to simultaneously impute missing range measurements and detect node anomaly in complex environments. Specifically, by utilizing inherent low-rank property of Euclidean Distance Matrix (EDM), we formulate range measurements imputation problem as a Robust -norm Regularized Matrix Decomposition (RRMD) model, where complex noise is fitted by Mixture of Gaussian (MoG) distribution, and node anomaly is sifted by -norm regularization. Meanwhile, an efficient optimization algorithm is designed to solve proposed RRMD model based on Expectation Maximization (EM) method. Furthermore, with the imputed EDM, all unknown nodes can be easily positioned by using Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) method. Finally, some experiments are designed to evaluate performance of the proposed method, and experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms three state-of-the-art node localization methods.

We propose a low rank structured matrix completion algorithm for image inpainting problems originated from scanning microscopy. The proposed method exploits the annihilation property observed in Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF) or partial differential equation (PDE)-based inpainting approaches. By utilizing the commutative property of the convolution, the annihilation property is embodied into rank-deficient block Hankel structure data matrices and the image inpainting problem is converted into low-rank structured matrix completion problem. To solve the structured low-rank matrix completion problem, an alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) method is used with factorization matrix initialization using the low rank matrix fitting (LMaFit) algorithm. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art image inpainting methods.

Low-rank matrix completion, which aims to recover a matrix with many missing values, has attracted much attention in many fields of computer science. A low-rank matrix fitting (LMaFit) method has been proposed for fast matrix completion recently. However, this method cannot converge accurately on matrices of real-world images. For improving the accuracy of LMaFit method, an improved low-rank matrix fitting (ILMF) method based on the weighted [Formula: see text] norm minimization is proposed in this paper, where the [Formula: see text] norm is the summation of the [Formula: see text]-power [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] norms of rows in a matrix. In the proposed method, i.e. the ILMF method, the incomplete matrix that may be corrupted by noises is decomposed into the summation of a low-rank matrix and a noise matrix at first. Then, a weighted [Formula: see text] norm minimization problem is solved by using an alternating direction method for improving the accuracy of matrix completion. Experimental results on real-world images show that the ILMF method has much better performances in terms of both the convergence accuracy and convergence speed than the compared methods.

The matrix completion problem consists of finding or approximating a low-rank matrix based on a few samples of this matrix. We propose a new algorithm for matrix completion that minimizes the least-square distance on the sampling set over the Riemannian manifold of fixed-rank matrices. The algorithm is an adaptation of classical nonlinear conjugate gradients, developed within the framework of retraction-based optimization on manifolds. We describe all the necessary objects from differential geometry necessary to perform optimization over this low-rank matrix manifold, seen as a submanifold embedded in the space of matrices. In particular, we describe how metric projection can be used as retraction and how vector transport lets us obtain the conjugate search directions. Finally, we prove convergence of a regularized version of our algorithm under the assumption that the restricted isometry property holds for incoherent matrices throughout the iterations. The numerical experiments indicate that our approach scales very well for large-scale problems and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art, while outperforming most existing solvers.

We address the problem of ad hoc microphone array calibration where some of the distances between the microphones can not be measured. The conventional techniques require information about all the distances for accurate reconstruction of the array geometry. To alleviate this condition, we propose to exploit the properties of Euclidean distance matrices within the framework of low-rank matrix completion to recover the missing entries. We provide rigorous analysis to bound the calibration error using noisy measurements. This study elucidates the links between the performance and the structure of the missing distances, along with the size of the network. The experiments carried out on real data recordings demonstrate these theoretical insights. A significant improvement is achieved by the proposed Euclidean distance matrix completion algorithm over the state-of-the-art techniques for ad hoc microphone array calibration.

The permittivity distribution of two different dielectric materials may be reconstructed by electrical capacitance tomography (ECT). The reconstructed image, however, often has artifacts due to the effect of noise in measured capacitance data. To improve the image quality, a new approach based on low-rank matrix recovery is proposed for ECT to reduce the noise in measurement data. In this approach, recovering the capacitance data is recast as recovering low-rank matrix from the noisy capacitance matrix. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is applied to obtain the low-rank capacitance matrix and the sparse error matrix. Simulation and experimental studies were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and the results are promising.

Low-rank matrix completion has achieved great success in many real-world data applications. A matrix factorization model that learns latent features is usually employed and, to improve prediction performance, the similarities between latent variables can be exploited by pairwise learning using the graph regularized matrix factorization (GRMF) method. However, existing GRMF approaches often use the squared loss to measure the pairwise differences, which may be overly influenced by dissimilar pairs and lead to inferior prediction. To fully empower pairwise learning for matrix completion, we propose a general optimization framework that allows a rich class of (non-)convex pairwise penalty functions. A new and efficient algorithm is developed to solve the proposed optimization problem, with a theoretical convergence guarantee under mild assumptions. In an important situation where the latent variables form a small number of subgroups, its statistical guarantee is also developed. In particular, we theoretically characterize the performance of the complexity-regularized maximum likelihood estimator, as a special case of our framework, which is shown to have smaller errors when compared to the standard matrix completion framework without pairwise penalties. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of this general framework.

In this paper, we present an efficient localization algorithm for sensor networks using range information. Since each sensor can only communicate with its neighbors, the Euclidean distance matrix (EDM), composed by squared distances between each pair of sensors, is incomplete. The first step of the proposed algorithm is to fulfill the EDM completion and relative maps of sensor networks are then achieved by the multidimensional scaling technique. Besides the EDM, the centralized Gram matrix of sensors’ coordinates is also used to model the localization problem. Compared with other EDM-based localization algorithms, mathematical properties of both the EDM and the Gram matrix are appropriately exploited so as to improve the estimation accuracy. The resulting localization model is formulated as a semidefinite programming problem. An alternating direction method of multipliers is further developed to enhance the scalability of the proposed algorithm. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the estimation accuracy of both the EDM completion and the final localization.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enormous potential to transform the transport industry by improving passenger experiences, safety, and efficiency. However, the collected spatiotemporal data by traffic sensor network often suffer from missing values (MVs), which affect the overall performance of the system. As a result, accurate recovery of MVs is essential for the successful application of IoT in transportation. In this article, we propose a novel MVs imputation model by integrating low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) and sparse self-representation into a unified framework. In doing so, the global multidimensional correlation, as well as sample self-similarity, can be well leveraged for imputation. In order to solve the proposed model, an elaborate solution algorithm is developed, following the principle of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMMs). Importantly, each step in ADMM can be implemented efficiently by analyzing the problem structure. Moreover, in order to select proper parameters for the model, an improved harmony search heuristic algorithm based on dual harmonies generation strategy is developed, thus sufficiently considering the information contained in current harmony memory. The experiments on two real-world traffic data are carried out to evaluate the proposed approach. The results verify that in comparison with the classic matrix/tensor completion and other competing algorithms, our method significantly improves the imputation performance.

Robust low-rank matrix completion (RMC), or robust principal component analysis with partially observed data, has been studied extensively for computer vision, signal processing and machine learning applications. This problem aims at decomposing a partially observed matrix into the superposition of a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix, where the sparse matrix captures the grossly corrupted entries of the matrix. A widely used approach to tackle RMC is to consider a convex formulation, which minimizes the nuclear norm of the low-rank matrix (to promote low-rankness) plus the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _1$</tex-math></inline-formula> norm of the sparse matrix (to promote sparsity). In this paper, motivated by some recent works on low-rank matrix completion and Riemannian optimization, we formulate this problem as a nonsmooth Riemannian optimization problem over Grassmann manifold. This new formulation is scalable as the low-rank matrix is factorized to the multiplication of two much smaller matrices. We then propose an alternating manifold proximal gradient continuation method to solve the proposed new formulation. Convergence rate of the proposed algorithm is rigorously analyzed. Numerical results on both synthetic data and real data on background extraction from surveillance videos are reported to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed new formulation and algorithm over several popular existing approaches.

The problem of recovering a low-rank matrix from partial entries, known as low-rank matrix completion, has been extensively investigated in recent years. It can be viewed as a special case of the affine constrained rank minimization problem which is NP-hard in general and is computationally hard to solve in practice. One widely studied approach is to replace the matrix rank function by its nuclear-norm, which leads to the convex nuclear-norm minimization problem solved efficiently by many popular convex optimization algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new nonconvex approach to better approximate the rank function. The new approximation function is actually the Moreau envelope of the rank function (MER) which has an explicit expression. The new approximation problem of low-rank matrix completion based on MER can be converted to an optimization problem with two variables. We then adapt the proximal alternating minimization algorithm to solve it. The convergence (rate) of the proposed algorithm is proved and its accelerated version is also developed. Numerical experiments on completion of low-rank random matrices and standard image inpainting problems have shown that our algorithms have better performance than some state-of-art methods.