1-Bit matrix completion: PAC-Bayesian analysis of a variational approximation

Abstract

We focus on the completion of a (possibly) low-rank matrix with binary entries, the so-called 1-bit matrix completion problem. Our approach relies on tools from machine learning theory: empirical risk minimization and its convex relaxations. We propose an algorithm to compute a variational approximation of the pseudo-posterior. Thanks to the convex relaxation, the corresponding minimization problem is bi-convex, and thus the method works well in practice. We study the performance of this variational approximation through PAC-Bayesian learning bounds. Contrary to previous works that focused on upper bounds on the estimation error of M with various matrix norms, we are able to derive from this analysis a PAC bound on the prediction error of our algorithm. We focus essentially on convex relaxation through the hinge loss, for which we present a complete analysis, a complete simulation study and a test on the MovieLens data set. We also discuss a variational approximation to deal with the logistic loss.