This paper addresses the problem of finding the low-rank and sparse components of a given matrix. The problem involves two conflicting objective functions, reducing the rank and sparsity of each part simultaneously. Previous methods combine two objectives into a single objective penalty function to solve with traditional numerical optimization approaches. The main contribution of this paper is to put forward a multiobjective method to decompose the given matrix into low-rank component and sparse part. We optimize two objective functions with an evolutionary multiobjective algorithm MOEA/D. Another contribution of this paper, a modified low-rank and sparse matrix model is proposed, which simplifying the variable of objective functions and improving the efficiency of multiobjective optimization. The proposed method obtains a set of solutions with different trade-off between low-rank and sparse objectives, and decision makers can choose one or more satisfied decomposed results according to different requirements directly. Experiments conducted on artificial datasets and nature images, show that the proposed method always obtains satisfied results, and the convergence, stability and robustness of the proposed method is acceptable.
Citation: Tao Wu, Yu Lei, Jiao Shi, Maoguo Gong. 2017: An evolutionary multiobjective method for low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition, Big Data and Information Analytics, 2(1): 23-37. doi: 10.3934/bdia.2017006
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This paper addresses the problem of finding the low-rank and sparse components of a given matrix. The problem involves two conflicting objective functions, reducing the rank and sparsity of each part simultaneously. Previous methods combine two objectives into a single objective penalty function to solve with traditional numerical optimization approaches. The main contribution of this paper is to put forward a multiobjective method to decompose the given matrix into low-rank component and sparse part. We optimize two objective functions with an evolutionary multiobjective algorithm MOEA/D. Another contribution of this paper, a modified low-rank and sparse matrix model is proposed, which simplifying the variable of objective functions and improving the efficiency of multiobjective optimization. The proposed method obtains a set of solutions with different trade-off between low-rank and sparse objectives, and decision makers can choose one or more satisfied decomposed results according to different requirements directly. Experiments conducted on artificial datasets and nature images, show that the proposed method always obtains satisfied results, and the convergence, stability and robustness of the proposed method is acceptable.
Matrix decomposition can catch some characteristic information of matrix, in which low-rank and sparse components are two of the most interesting. In the past decades, the theory of matrix decomposition has been developed rapidly, especially low-rank or sparse matrix decomposition have been used for many popular research areas, such as machine learning, image/signal processing and network analysis etc[19,22,24,20]. The problem of low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition (LRSMD) is highlighted and intensively studied recently in [4,6], especially in robust principle component analysis (PCA).
As described in the literature [4], we present a matrix
D=L0+S0, | (1) |
where
minimize (rank(L0),card(S0))subject to L0+S0=D. | (2) |
It is known that the LRSMD problem is in general ill-posed and NP-hard [4], and the easiest way is finding a convex optimization problem to approximate original problem. The heuristics of using the
minimize ‖L‖∗+λ‖S‖1subject to L+S=D, | (3) |
where
Nowadays, many methods based on different strategies have been proposed. Iterative thresholding (IT) algorithms [1,2] regularize the problem (3) and construct a Lagrange function, and then two objective variables are updated alternately. The iterative form of IT algorithms is simple and convergent, but the rate of convergence is slow and it is difficult to select the appropriate length of step. Accelerated proximal gradient (APG) algorithm [12] is another iterative approach, which building partial quadratic approximation by using Lipschitz gradient to solve the Lagrange function, iterating and getting solution. Although it is similar as IT algorithms, it reduces the number of iterations greatly. The dual method [12] is proposed because the nuclear norm is dual to spectral norm, the dual problem of problem (3) is easier to solve. Compared with APG algorithm, it has better scalability because it do not need complete singular decomposition in each iteration. One of the most influential method is augmented Lagrange multipliers (ALM) method [13]. The ALM method constructs augmented Lagrange function firstly, and then using alternating iteration method to optimize the problem. It is called EALM when using an exact augmented Lagrange multipliers while it is named IALM with inexact multipliers. IALM is also known as alternating direction methods (ADM)[21]. ALM method is more efficient than APG method, and can achieve higher accuracy with lower storage space.
For low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition problem, most of methods consider the ratio of low-rank degree and sparsity as a certain parameter, however different given matrices or requirements are always with different parameter
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the related background and motivation about the proposed method. In Section 3, the proposed model and algorithm are presented in detail. Experimental study is described in Section 4. Finally, concluding remarks are given in Section 5.
In this section, in order to make it easier to understand the proposed method, we will give a brief introduction to multiobjective optimization. Then we will describe the motivation of multiobjective low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition.
In general, it will be called multiobjective optimization (MOO), when the number of objective function is more than one and need to optimize simultaneously [8,7,14]. A MOP can be stated as:
min F(x)=(f1(x),⋯,fm(x))Tsubject to x∈Ω, | (4) |
where
Let
∀i=1,2,⋯,m fi(xA)≤fi(xB)∃j=1,2,⋯,m fj(xA)<fj(xB), | (5) |
and mark it as
In practical applications, most objective functions have many or even infinite solutions, and we can not get all of them [23]. The purpose of multiobjective optimization is that finding a uniformly distributed Pareto front under a certain amount, which can represent the whole Pareto front. Evolutionary algorithm is one of the most popular methods for solving multiobjective optimization [11,18,25,9,23], such as VEGA [18], SPEA-Ⅱ [25], NSGA-Ⅱ [9] and MOEA/D [23]. Zhang and Li [23] proposed the MOEA/D which has a good performance in MOPs. MOEA/D decomposes the MOPs into a series scalar optimization subproblems with different weights. Due to the solution of each subproblem is similar to neighboring subproblems, the solution can be optimized by neighboring subproblems information. In this paper, due to the problem can be decomposed naturally with different parameter
For matrix decomposition with constraints of rank and sparsity, as described in problem 2, most of methods convert NP-hard problem into convex optimization. However these algorithms have to set a value of parameter
Multiobjective optimization is a popular way to avoiding the difficulty of parameter
For LRSMD, we focus on a more original problem, which thinks LRSMD as a multiobjective problem. The essence of the MOO is to optimize several conflicting objectives simultaneously. As described in problem (2), there are two existing conflicting objectives, which represent low-rank degree and sparsity respectively. We can obtain different solutions by a evolutionary multiobjective algorithm, such as MOEA/D. And each solution in the Pareto front represents a trade-off between reducing rank of low-rank component and decreasing the sparsity of sparse part, which can satisfy different requirements of decision makers.
First of all, we introduce the model of multiobjective low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition based on matrix singular value decomposition. Then details of multiobjective low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition algorithm will be described, which show how the MOO approach is applied in matrix decomposition.
As is mentioned in Section 1, problem (2) is a standard multiobjective problem, however it is hard to optimize even with evolutionary algorithm. The reasons can summary as follow: 1) both two objective functions are NP-hard and the low-rank component and sparse component are tightly correlative. 2) the decision variable of problem (2) is complex whatever it is low-rank component
Let the singular value vector
f1(x)=n∑i=1|xi|. | (6) |
Similarly, sparsity of sparse component is defined as
f2(x)=m∑i=1n∑j=1|Sij(x)|, | (7) |
where
At this point, the two objective functions can be combined into a MOP. It has the following form:
minxF(x)=minx(f1,f2)subject to x∈Ω. | (8) |
For low rank component, it is hard to measure and optimize, but the singular value vector can approximate it. When
Algorithm 1 Multiobjective LRSMD Model |
Input: |
Output: |
1: Step 1) |
2: Step 2) Generate a set of nondominated solutions ( |
3: Step 3) Recovery |
4: for |
5: Step 3.1) |
6: Step 3.2) |
7: Step 3.2) |
8: end for |
In this paper, the framework of MOEA/D [23] is applied in MOLRSMD because of the characteristic of MOEA/D which decomposing the MOP into several scalar optimization subproblems. In MOLRSMD we use Tchebycheff approach to decompose the multiobjective optimization problem (8), and the scalar optimization subproblem is in the form
min gte(x|w)=max{w1|f1−z∗1|,w2|f2−z∗2|}subject to x∈Ω, | (9) |
where
The procedure of the proposed algorithm for low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition is given in Algorithm 2. The MOLRSMD problem can be decomposed into
Algorithm 2 Procedure of MOLRSMD based on MOEA/D |
Input: stopping criterion: |
Output: Pareto front solution; matrix decomposition results. |
1: Step 1) Initialization |
2: Step 1.1) Generate a uniform distributed of |
3: Step 1.2) Generate an initial population |
4: Step 1.3) Initialize two reference points |
5: Step 1.4) For each |
6: Step 2) Set |
7: Step 3) Update |
8: for |
9: Step 3.1) Randomly select two indexes |
10: Step 3.2) Apply a thresholding method to improve |
11: Step 3.3) For each |
12: Step 3.4) For each index |
13: end for |
14: Step 4) Stopping criteria: If |
In this algorithm, some ideas of Tchebycheff decomposition and genetic operators are used which make solutions distribute more uniform and algorithm convergence faster. Next, some details about these ideas will be introduced.
In this paper, due to the difference of orders of magnitude between two objective functions value, the strategy of objective functions normalization is employed. In general, the value of objective function is large especially the range of two objectives have a huge difference, which make Pareto front is not uniform and most of points cluster in corner. A simple function normalization method formed as follow
¯fi=fi−zlizui−zli | (10) |
where
¯gws(x|w,zl,zu)=max{w1|f1−z∗1|,w2|f2−z∗2|}=max{w1|¯f1−¯z∗1|,w2|¯f2−¯z∗2|}=max{w1|f1−zl1zu1−zl1|,w2|f2−zl2zu2−zl2|}, | (11) |
Genetic operator is the key of evolutionary algorithm, with genetic operator combined characteristic of optimization problem, the convergence speed of algorithm can be improved. In this paper, we use a difference strategy and double local mutation method to speed up algorithm.
In crossover operator, difference optimization strategy is applied. We select two individuals randomly from the neighborhood of
yj={xij+F(xkj−xlj) if r<pcxij otherwise | (12) |
where
We apply a scale controllable mutation with two different mutations to balance diversity and precision of population. In the paper, we select Gauss mutation and polynomial mutation. Gauss mutation is simple than polynomial mutation and well done in global searching. Polynomial mutation for local search can improve the quality of solution. Therefore, if a random number
y′={Gauss(y,σ)if rand<psPolynomial(y)otherwise | (13) |
where
In this section, setting singular value vector as decision variable, makes problem simpler and easier to optimize. On the one hand, the complexity of variable is
In this section, we will represent experiments on artificial generated datasets and some nature images to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experiment focus on how the multiobjective low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition algorithm works with different type test data, and analyzing the performance with the convergence, stability and robustness.
Let
In order to illustrate the result of experiment intuitively, we define some indexes to measure results and the performance of the proposed method. The relative error to the original low-rank matrix
ErrLR:=||L−L∗||F||L∗||F. | (14) |
Similarly, the relative error to the original sparse matrix
ErrSP:=||S−S∗||F||S∗||F. | (15) |
The total error to original matrix is
ErrT:=||L+S−D∗||F||D∗||F. | (16) |
Due to the characteristic of multiobjective matrix decomposition method, there are many different decomposition results and some results are widely different with original matrices. On the one hand, in order to analysis the accuracy of matrix decomposition in artificial datasets, we just focus on solution with smallest recovery error and the distribute of Pareto front. On the other hand, we could select solution with actual demand when all decomposed solutions would be represented with images in nature images.
The parameters in the proposed method are given in Table 1.
Parameter | Meaning | Value |
The number of subproblems | 100 | |
The number of neighbors | 20 | |
| The maximum of generations | 300 |
| The probability of crossover | 0.8 |
| The differential multiplier | 0.5 |
| The probability of mutation | 0.2 |
| The probability of mutation selection | 0.85 |
For artificial generated datasets, we select three different size test matrices, which the sizes are
Furthermore, we also do experiments on some data with noise to test the robustness of the proposed method. For data with size:
Figure 4 displays the box-plot of recovering error in five noisy situations, which is described as above. We can know that not only the error of low-rank recovering but also sparse recovering is changed in a small range with different types noise. With the improved of number of noise points or
In the nature images, the proposed method also works well. The images that we used is consisted of Lena and orl-faces datasets. Due to no standard decomposed results of datasets, we just analysis the Pareto front and practical results to evaluate performance of the proposed method. Some results are displayed in Figure 6 and Figure 7. Figure 6 is about image Lena and Figure 7 is result in one random face image from orl-faces. We can see that the Pareto front of the proposed method is smooth and equally distributed, which means the method converges to PF stably. The (b) of Figure 6 and 7 show three different decomposed results with different locations in the PF. The first row of part (b) means sparse component has an absolute advantages, on the contrary, the third row shows low-rank part with more advantage. The middle one is a balance between low-rank and sparse components.
The performance of the proposed MOLRSMD have been examined in the previous subsection. In this subsection, simple comparison with some advanced LRSMD algorithms is tested on artificial datasets. ADM [21] and ALM [13] are two mainstream and efficient algorithms in exiting research. Both of them need set parameter
Methods | | | |
MOLRSMD | 0.0100 | 0.1986 | 0 |
ADM | 0.0299 | 0.1331 | 1.9135e-17 |
ALM | 0.0148 | 0.0661 | 2.2412e-10 |
Each row of Figure 8 presents the Pareto front by different algorithms. The Pareto front of MOLRSMD is complete and smooth as compared with ADM and ALM. The results of ADM and ALM are with uneven distribution, most of Pareto optimal solutions cluster in low sparsity region even the region with sparsity close to zero. In particular, from the second row of Figure 8, solutions of ADM and ALM with a sudden change and most of solutions cluster in two regions (the value of two objective functions are about 7500,2500 and 4500, 0 respectively) while solutions of the proposed MOLRSMD with uniform and smooth distribution. Table 2 represents the smallest recovery error from 100 solutions of the proposed MOLRSMD, ADM and ALM on artificial datasets (size: 50
In this paper, an evolutionary multiobjective low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition method has been proposed, for finding optimal trade-off solutions between the rank of low-rank component and the sparsity of sparse part. We focus on more original problem of low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition, with the theorem of matrix singular value decomposition, modifying the model by replacing decision variable with singular value vector. We have experiments on different type datasets, including artificial datasets, datasets with noise and nature images, to indicate that the proposed MOLRSMD is always with good convergence, reliable stability and acceptable robustness. It also show that it can be applied to some practical problem.
Future work will be attention on decreasing the accuracy of recovering. In the proposed method, the orthogonal matrices
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Parameter | Meaning | Value |
The number of subproblems | 100 | |
The number of neighbors | 20 | |
| The maximum of generations | 300 |
| The probability of crossover | 0.8 |
| The differential multiplier | 0.5 |
| The probability of mutation | 0.2 |
| The probability of mutation selection | 0.85 |
Methods | | | |
MOLRSMD | 0.0100 | 0.1986 | 0 |
ADM | 0.0299 | 0.1331 | 1.9135e-17 |
ALM | 0.0148 | 0.0661 | 2.2412e-10 |
Parameter | Meaning | Value |
The number of subproblems | 100 | |
The number of neighbors | 20 | |
| The maximum of generations | 300 |
| The probability of crossover | 0.8 |
| The differential multiplier | 0.5 |
| The probability of mutation | 0.2 |
| The probability of mutation selection | 0.85 |
Methods | | | |
MOLRSMD | 0.0100 | 0.1986 | 0 |
ADM | 0.0299 | 0.1331 | 1.9135e-17 |
ALM | 0.0148 | 0.0661 | 2.2412e-10 |