Review for NeurIPS paper: Robust Sub-Gaussian Principal Component Analysis and Width-Independent Schatten Packing

Summary and Contributions: This paper studies the problem of Robust PCA of a subgaussian distribution. Specifically, one is given samples X_1,X_2,...,X_n from a subgaussian distribution, such that an eps-fraction of the samples have been arbitrarily corruption (modified by an adversary), the goal is to approximately recover the top singular vector of the covariance matrix Sigma. Here, approximately recover means to find a vector u such that u T Sigma u (1 - gamma) Sigma _op, where Sigma _op is the operator norm of Sigma. The main result of this paper are runtime and sample complexity efficient algorithms for this task. Specifically, they show 1) An algorithm that achieves error gamma O(eps log(1/eps)) in polynomial time, specifically in tilde{O}(n d 2/eps) time, using n Omega(d /*(eps log(1/eps)) 2) samples.