Low rank matrix recovery from rank one measurements

Abstract

We study the recovery of Hermitian low rank matrices X ∈ C n × n from undersampled measurements via nuclear norm minimization. We consider the particular scenario where the measurements are Frobenius inner products with random rank-one matrices of the form a j a j ⁎ for some measurement vectors a 1 , … , a m , i.e., the measurements are given by b j = tr ( X a j a j ⁎ ) . The case where the matrix X = x x ⁎ to be recovered is of rank one reduces to the problem of phaseless estimation (from measurements b j = | 〈 x , a j 〉 | 2 ) via the PhaseLift approach, which has been introduced recently. We derive bounds for the number m of measurements that guarantee successful uniform recovery of Hermitian rank r matrices, either for the vectors a j , j = 1 , … , m , being chosen independently at random according to a standard Gaussian distribution, or a j being sampled independently from an (approximate) complex projective t -design with t = 4 . In the Gaussian case, we require m ≥ C r n measurements, while in the case of 4-designs we need m ≥ Cr n log ⁡ ( n ) . Our results are uniform in the sense that one random choice of the measurement vectors a j guarantees recovery of all rank r -matrices simultaneously with high probability. Moreover, we prove robustness of recovery under perturbation of the measurements by noise. The result for approximate 4-designs generalizes and improves a recent bound on phase retrieval due to Gross, Krahmer and Kueng. In addition, it has applications in quantum state tomography. Our proofs employ the so-called bowling scheme which is based on recent ideas by Mendelson and Koltchinskii.