English

Denoising data using convex relaxations

Methodology 2026-05-07 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We study the problem of denoising observations Yi=Xi+ZiY_i=X_i+Z_i, where the latent variables XiX_i are sampled from a low-dimensional manifold in Rn\mathbb{R}^n and the noise variables ZiZ_i are isotropic Gaussian. We propose a convex-relaxation estimator that first reduces dimension by principal component analysis and then projects the observations onto the convex hull of the projected latent manifold. We construct a statistical oracle that estimates its supporting hyperplanes from empirical Gaussian tail probabilities of the noisy sample. Under a lower-mass condition on the latent distribution, we prove finite-sample guarantees for the oracle and derive error bounds for the resulting denoiser. The analysis combines risk bounds for least-squares projection under convex constraints with entropy bounds for convex hulls. We also verify the assumptions of the framework for a Cryo-Electron Microscopy observation model by establishing suitable covering number and Lipschitz estimates for the associated group action and imaging operators.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.02327,
  title  = {Denoising data using convex relaxations},
  author = {Charles Fefferman and Aalok Gangopadhyay and Matti Lassas and Jonathan Marty and Hariharan Narayanan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02327},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

38 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:48:08.600Z