Exact Minimax Optimality of Spectral Methods in Phase Synchronization and Orthogonal Group Synchronization

TL;DR

This paper proves that spectral methods for phase synchronization and orthogonal group synchronization are minimax optimal, matching the performance of more complex algorithms under Gaussian noise and incomplete data.

Contribution

It establishes the exact minimax optimality of spectral methods in phase and orthogonal group synchronization, introducing a novel eigenvector choice and perturbation analysis toolkit.

Findings

Spectral method achieves minimax lower bound with matching constant.

Spectral method performs as well as maximum likelihood and semidefinite programming.

New perturbation analysis shows eigenvector approximation accuracy.

Abstract

We study the performance of the spectral method for the phase synchronization problem with additive Gaussian noises and incomplete data. The spectral method utilizes the leading eigenvector of the data matrix followed by a normalization step. We prove that it achieves the minimax lower bound of the problem with a matching leading constant under a squared $\ell_2$ loss. This shows that the spectral method has the same performance as more sophisticated procedures including maximum likelihood estimation, generalized power method, and semidefinite programming, as long as consistent parameter estimation is possible. To establish our result, we first have a novel choice of the population eigenvector, which enables us to establish the exact recovery of the spectral method when there is no additive noise. We then develop a new perturbation analysis toolkit for the leading eigenvector and show it can be well-approximated by its first-order approximation with a small $\ell_2$ error. We further extend our analysis to establish the exact minimax optimality of the spectral method for the orthogonal group synchronization.