Provable Non-Convex Euclidean Distance Matrix Completion: Geometry, Reconstruction, and Robustness

The problem of recovering the configuration of points from their partial pairwise distances, referred to as the Euclidean Distance Matrix Completion (EDMC) problem, arises in a broad range of applications, including sensor network localization, molecular conformation, and manifold learning. In this paper, we propose a Riemannian optimization framework for solving the EDMC problem by formulating it as a low-rank matrix completion task over the space of positive semi-definite Gram matrices. The available distance measurements are encoded as expansion coefficients in a non-orthogonal basis, and optimization over the Gram matrix implicitly enforces geometric consistency through nonnegativity and the triangle inequality, a structure inherited from classical multidimensional scaling. Under a Bernoulli sampling model for observed distances, we prove that Riemannian gradient descent on the manifold of rank-$r$ matrices locally converges linearly with high probability when the sampling probability satisfies $p\geq O(\nu^2 r^2\log(n)/n)$, where $\nu$ is an EDMC-specific incoherence parameter. Furthermore, we provide an initialization candidate using a one-step hard thresholding procedure that yields convergence, provided the sampling probability satisfies $p \geq O(\nu r^{3/2}\log^{3/4}(n)/n^{1/4})$. A key technical contribution of this work is the analysis of a symmetric linear operator arising from a dual basis expansion in the non-orthogonal basis, which requires analysis of a second order degenerate U-statistic to establish an optimal restricted isometry property in the presence of coupled terms. Empirical evaluations on synthetic data demonstrate that our algorithm achieves competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we provide a geometric interpretation of matrix incoherence tailored to the EDMC setting and provide robustness guarantees for our method.