Strongly Convex Programming for Exact Matrix Completion and Robust Principal Component Analysis

The common task in matrix completion (MC) and robust principle component analysis (RPCA) is to recover a low-rank matrix from a given data matrix. These problems gained great attention from various areas in applied sciences recently, especially after the publication of the pioneering works of Candès et al.. One fundamental result in MC and RPCA is that nuclear norm based convex optimizations lead to the exact low-rank matrix recovery under suitable conditions. In this paper, we extend this result by showing that strongly convex optimizations can guarantee the exact low-rank matrix recovery as well. The result in this paper not only provides sufficient conditions under which the strongly convex models lead to the exact low-rank matrix recovery, but also guides us on how to choose suitable parameters in practical algorithms.