Sparse and Low-Rank Covariance Matrix Estimation

This paper aims at achieving a simultaneously sparse and low-rank estimator from the semidefinite population covariance matrices.We first benefit from a convex optimization which develops l1-norm penalty to encourage the sparsity and nuclear norm to favor the low-rank property.For the proposed estimator,we then prove that with high probability,the Frobenius norm of the estimation rate can be of order O(√((slgg p)/n))under a mild case,where s and p denote the number of nonzero entries and the dimension of the population covariance,respectively and n notes the sample capacity.Finally,an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers with global convergence is proposed to tackle this problem,and merits of the approach are also illustrated by practicing numerical simulations.