(11/08/18) New paper: Optimal spectral method for high-dimensional signal estimation

November 8, 2018

In our recent paper, we present the optimal design of a spectral method widely used to initialize nonconvex optimization algorithms for solving phase retrieval and other signal recovery problems. Our work leverages recent results that provide an exact characterization of the performance of the spectral method in the high-dimensional limit. Interestingly, under a mild technical condition, our results show that there exists a fixed design that is uniformly optimal over all sampling ratios. In a recent work, Mondelli and Montanari have shown the existence of a weak reconstruction threshold below which the spectral method cannot provide useful estimates. Our results serve to complement that work by deriving the fundamental limit of the spectral method beyond the aforementioned threshold.