Sparse PCA: A New Scalable Estimator Based On Integer Programming

We consider the Sparse Principal Component Analysis (SPCA) problem under the well-known spiked covariance model. Recent work has shown that the SPCA problem can be reformulated as a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) and can be solved to global optimality, leading to estimators that are known to enjoy optimal statistical properties. However, current MIP algorithms for SPCA are unable to scale beyond instances with a thousand features or so. In this paper, we propose a new estimator for SPCA which can be formulated as a MIP. Different from earlier work, we make use of the underlying spiked covariance model and properties of the multivariate Gaussian distribution to arrive at our estimator. We establish statistical guarantees for our proposed estimator in terms of estimation error and support recovery. We propose a custom algorithm to solve the MIP which is significantly more scalable than off-the-shelf solvers; and demonstrate that our approach can be much more computationally attractive compared to earlier exact MIP-based approaches for the SPCA problem. Our numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that our algorithms can address problems with up to 20, 000 features in minutes; and generally result in favorable statistical properties compared to existing popular approaches for SPCA.