Optimal Rates of Statistical Seriation
Abstract
Given a matrix the seriation problem consists in permuting its rows in such way that all its columns have the same shape, for example, they are monotone increasing. We propose a statistical approach to this problem where the matrix of interest is observed with noise and study the corresponding minimax rate of estimation of the matrices. Specifically, when the columns are either unimodal or monotone, we show that the least squares estimator is optimal up to logarithmic factors and adapts to matrices with a certain natural structure. Finally, we propose a computationally efficient estimator in the monotonic case and study its performance both theoretically and experimentally. Our work is at the intersection of shape constrained estimation and recent work that involves permutation learning, such as graph denoising and ranking.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.02435,
title = {Optimal Rates of Statistical Seriation},
author = {Nicolas Flammarion and Cheng Mao and Philippe Rigollet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.02435},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
V2 corrects an error in Lemma A.1, v3 corrects appendix F on unimodal regression where the bounds now hold with polynomial probability rather than exponential