Frank-Wolfe-based Algorithms for Approximating Tyler's M-estimator
Main Conference Track
Authors: Lior Danon, Dan Garber

Tyler's M-estimator is a well known procedure for robust and heavy-tailed covariance estimation. Tyler himself suggested an iterative fixed-point algorithm  for computing his estimator however, it requires super-linear (in the size of the data) runtime per iteration, which maybe prohibitive in large scale. In this work we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first Frank-Wolfe-based algorithms for computing Tyler's estimator. One variant uses standard Frank-Wolfe steps, the second also considers \textit{away-steps} (AFW), and the third is a \textit{geodesic} version of AFW (GAFW). AFW provably requires, up to a log factor, only linear time per iteration, while GAFW runs in linear time (up to a log factor) in a large $n$ (number of data-points) regime.  All three variants are shown to provably converge to the optimal solution with sublinear rate, under standard assumptions, despite the fact that the underlying optimization problem is not convex nor smooth. Under an additional fairly mild assumption, that holds with probability 1 when the (normalized) data-points are i.i.d. samples from a continuous distribution supported on the entire unit sphere, AFW and GAFW are proved to converge with linear rates. Importantly, all three variants are  parameter-free and use adaptive step-sizes.