Rank-Sparsity Incoherence for Matrix Decomposition

Suppose we are given a matrix that is formed by adding an unknown sparse matrix to an unknown low-rank matrix. Our goal is to decompose the given matrix into its sparse and low-rank components. Such a problem arises in a number of applications in model and system identification and is intractable to solve in general. In this paper we consider a convex optimization formulation to splitting the specified matrix into its components by minimizing a linear combination of the ℓ_1 norm and the nuclear norm of the components. We develop a notion of rank-sparsity incoherence, expressed as an uncertainty principle between the sparsity pattern of a matrix and its row and column spaces, and we use it to characterize both…