EXACT MINIMAX OPTIMALITY OF SPECTRAL METHODS IN PHASE SYNCHRONIZATION AND ORTHOGONAL GROUP SYNCHRONIZATION

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Zhang, Anderson Ye
• 署名单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 刊物名称: ANNALS OF STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0090-5364
• DOI: 10.1214/24-AOS2424
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 2112-2138
• 关键词: generalized power method; eigenvectors; performance; matrices; bounds

摘要

We study the performance of the spectral method for the phase synchronization problem with additive Gaussian noises and incomplete data. The spectral method utilizes the leading eigenvector of the data matrix followed by a normalization step. We prove that it achieves the minimax lower bound of the problem with a matching leading constant under a squared 2 pound loss. This shows that the spectral method has the same performance as more sophisticated procedures including maximum likelihood estimation, generalized power method, and semidefinite programming, as long as consistent parameter estimation is possible. To establish our result, we first have a novel choice of the population eigenvector, which enables us to establish the exact recovery of the spectral method when there is no additive noise. We then develop a new perturbation analysis toolkit for the leading eigenvector and show it can be well-approximated by its first-order approximation with a small 2 pound error. We further extend our analysis to establish the exact minimax optimality of the spectral method for the orthogonal group synchronization.