A Generalized CUR decomposition for matrix pairs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized CUR decomposition for matrix pairs that enables simultaneous low-rank approximation of two related matrices using a novel selection method, with applications in feature extraction and data analysis.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new GCUR decomposition method for matrix pairs, extending CUR to jointly decompose two matrices and establishing connections with existing CUR methods.

Findings

Outperforms standard CUR in numerical experiments

Effective in recovering data with colored noise

Useful for subgroup discovery and feature extraction

Abstract

We propose a generalized CUR (GCUR) decomposition for matrix pairs $(A, B)$. Given matrices $A$ and $B$ with the same number of columns, such a decomposition provides low-rank approximations of both matrices simultaneously, in terms of some of their rows and columns. We obtain the indices for selecting the subset of rows and columns of the original matrices using the discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM) on the generalized singular vectors. When $B$ is square and nonsingular, there are close connections between the GCUR of $(A, B)$ and the DEIM-induced CUR of $AB^{-1}$. When $B$ is the identity, the GCUR decomposition of $A$ coincides with the DEIM-induced CUR decomposition of $A$. We also show a similar connection between the GCUR of $(A, B)$ and the CUR of $AB^+$ for a nonsquare but full-rank matrix $B$, where $B^+$ denotes the Moore--Penrose pseudoinverse of $B$. While a CUR decomposition acts on one data set, a GCUR factorization jointly decomposes two data sets. The algorithm may be suitable for applications where one is interested in extracting the most discriminative features from one data set relative to another data set. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of the new method over the standard CUR approximation; for recovering data perturbed with colored noise and subgroup discovery.