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We study the problem of detecting a structured, low-rank signal matrix corrupted with additive Gaussian noise. This includes clustering in a Gaussian mixture model, sparse PCA, and submatrix localization. Each of these problems is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-01-24 Jess Banks , Cristopher Moore , Nicolas Verzelen , Roman Vershynin , Jiaming Xu

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a classical method for dimensionality reduction based on extracting the dominant eigenvectors of the sample covariance matrix. However, PCA is well known to behave poorly in the ``large $p$, small $n$''…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-08-26 Arash A. Amini , Martin J. Wainwright

We study attention mechanisms through the lens of a canonical unsupervised problem: principal component analysis (PCA). We show that, when trained on Gaussian data, both softmax and linear attention layers learn parameters that align with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Claire Boyer

We study the problem of high-dimensional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with missing observations. In simple, homogeneous missingness settings with a noise level of constant order, we show that an existing inverse-probability weighted…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-01 Ziwei Zhu , Tengyao Wang , Richard J. Samworth

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a powerful tool in statistics and machine learning. While existing study of PCA focuses on the recovery of principal components and their associated eigenvalues, there are few precise characterizations…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-04-12 Emmanuel Abbe , Jianqing Fan , Kaizheng Wang

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most popular dimension reduction techniques in statistics and is especially powerful when a multivariate distribution is concentrated near a lower-dimensional subspace. Multivariate extreme…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-15 Felix Reinbott , Anja Janßen

Principal components analysis (PCA) is a classical method for the reduction of dimensionality of data in the form of n observations (or cases) of a vector with p variables. For a simple model of factor analysis type, it is proved that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-01-29 Iain M Johnstone , Arthur Yu Lu

In a spiked population model, the population covariance matrix has all its eigenvalues equal to units except for a few fixed eigenvalues (spikes). Determining the number of spikes is a fundamental problem which appears in many scientific…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-04-18 Damien Passemier , Jian-Feng Yao

We study the high-dimensional inference of a rank-one signal corrupted by sparse noise. The noise is modelled as the adjacency matrix of a weighted undirected graph with finite average connectivity in the large size limit. Using the replica…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Urte Adomaityte , Gabriele Sicuro , Pierpaolo Vivo

We study the asymptotic behavior of the spectrum of a random matrix where a non-linearity is applied entry-wise to a Wigner matrix perturbed by a rank-one spike with independent and identically distributed entries. In this setting, we show…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-10-24 Alice Guionnet , Justin Ko , Florent Krzakala , Pierre Mergny , Lenka Zdeborová

In a spiked population model, the population covariance matrix has all its eigenvalues equal to units except for a few fixed eigenvalues (spikes). This model is proposed by Johnstone to cope with empirical findings on various data sets. The…

Probability · Mathematics 2008-12-18 Zhidong Bai , Jian-feng Yao

We study the algorithmic thresholds for principal component analysis of Gaussian $k$-tensors with a planted rank-one spike, via Langevin dynamics and gradient descent. In order to efficiently recover the spike from natural initializations,…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-06-23 Gerard Ben Arous , Reza Gheissari , Aukosh Jagannath

In the spiked population model introduced by Johnstone (2001),the population covariance matrix has all its eigenvalues equal to unit except for a few fixed eigenvalues (spikes). The question is to quantify the effect of the perturbation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-06-06 Zhidong Bai , Jian-Feng Yao

Sparse Principal Component Analysis (sPCA) is a cardinal technique for obtaining combinations of features, or principal components (PCs), that explain the variance of high-dimensional datasets in an interpretable manner. This involves…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Ryan Cory-Wright , Jean Pauphilet

This article establishes a new and comprehensive estimation and inference theory for principal component analysis (PCA) under the weak factor model that allow for cross-sectional dependent idiosyncratic components under the nearly minimal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-02 Jianqing Fan , Yuling Yan , Yuheng Zheng

A general framework for principal component analysis (PCA) in the presence of heteroskedastic noise is introduced. We propose an algorithm called HeteroPCA, which involves iteratively imputing the diagonal entries of the sample covariance…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-04-02 Anru R. Zhang , T. Tony Cai , Yihong Wu

The spiked Wigner ensemble is a prototypical model for high-dimensional inference. We study the spectral properties of an inhomogeneous rank-one spiked Wigner model in which the variance of each entry of the noise matrix is itself a random…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-21 Leonardo S. Ferreira , Fernando L. Metz

In this paper, we develop new statistical theory for probabilistic principal component analysis models in high dimensions. The focus is the estimation of the noise variance, which is an important and unresolved issue when the number of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-06-23 Damien Passemier , Zhaoyuan Li , Jian-Feng Yao

We study asymmetric rank-one spiked tensor models in the high-dimensional regime, where the noise entries are independent and identically distributed with zero mean, unit variance, and finite fourth moment. This extends the classical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-12 Yanjin Xiang , Zhihua Zhang

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a well known procedure to reduce intrinsic complexity of a dataset, essentially through simplifying the covariance structure or the correlation structure. We introduce a novel algebraic, model-based…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-09 Martin Schlather , Felix Reinbott