stat.MEMay 4, 2026

Denoising data using convex relaxations

Authors: Charles FeffermanAalok GangopadhyayMatti LassasJonathan MartyHariharan Narayanan

Organizations: Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. · TCS Research · Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland. · Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (PACM), Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. · School of Technology and Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai 400005, India.

Abstract

We study the problem of denoising observations Yi=Xi+ZiY_i=X_i+Z_i, where the latent variables XiX_i are sampled from a low-dimensional manifold in Rn\mathbb{R}^n and the noise variables ZiZ_i are isotropic Gaussian. We propose a convex-relaxation estimator that first reduces dimension by principal component analysis and then projects the observations onto the convex hull of the projected latent manifold. We construct a statistical oracle that estimates its supporting hyperplanes from empirical Gaussian tail probabilities of the noisy sample. Under a lower-mass condition on the latent distribution, we prove finite-sample guarantees for the oracle and derive error bounds for the resulting denoiser. The analysis combines risk bounds for least-squares projection under convex constraints with entropy bounds for convex hulls. We also verify the assumptions of the framework for a Cryo-Electron Microscopy observation model by establishing suitable covering number and Lipschitz estimates for the associated group action and imaging operators.

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