This paper aims to recover a multi-subspace matrix from permuted data: given a matrix, in which the columns are drawn from a union of low-dimensional subspaces and some columns are corrupted by permutations on their entries, recover the original matrix. The task has numerous practical applications such as data cleaning, integration, and de-anonymization, but it remains challenging and cannot be well addressed by existing techniques such as robust principal component analysis because of the presence of multiple subspaces and the permutations on the elements of vectors. To solve the challenge, we develop a novel four-stage algorithm pipeline including outlier identification, subspace reconstruction, outlier classification, and unsupervised sensing for permuted vector recovery. Particularly, we provide theoretical guarantees for the outlier classification step, ensuring reliable multi-subspace matrix recovery. Our pipeline is compared with state-of-the-art competitors on multiple benchmarks and shows superior performance.

We propose a novel method called robust kernel principal component analysis (RKPCA) to decompose a partially corrupted matrix as a sparse matrix plus a high or full-rank matrix whose columns are drawn from a nonlinear low-dimensional latent variable model. RKPCA can be applied to many problems such as noise removal and subspace clustering and is so far the only unsupervised nonlinear method robust to sparse noises. We also provide theoretical guarantees for RKPCA. The optimization of RKPCA is challenging because it involves nonconvex and indifferentiable problems simultaneously. We propose two nonconvex optimization algorithms for RKPCA: alternating direction method of multipliers with backtracking line search and proximal linearized minimization with adaptive step size. Comparative studies on synthetic data and nature images corroborate the effectiveness and superiority of RKPCA in noise removal and robust subspace clustering.