High-dimensional estimation with missing data: Statistical and computational limits

arXiv:2603.16712v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We consider computationally-efficient estimation of population parameters when observations are subject to missing data. In particular, we consider estimation under the realizable contamination model of missing data in which an $epsilon$ fraction of the observations are subject to an arbitrary (and unknown) missing not at random (MNAR) mechanism. When the true data is Gaussian, we provide evidence towards statistical-computational gaps in several problems. For mean estimation in $ell_2$ norm, we show that in order to obtain error at most $rho$, for any constant contamination $epsilon in (0, 1)$, (roughly) $n gtrsim d e^{1/rho^2}$ samples are necessary and that there is a computationally-inefficient algorithm which achieves this error. On the other hand, we show that any computationally-efficient method within certain popular families of algorithms requires a much larger sample complexity of (roughly) $n gtrsim d^{1/rho^2}$ and that there exists a polynomial time algorithm based on sum-of-squares which (nearly) achieves this lower bound. For covariance estimation in relative operator norm, we show that a parallel development holds. Finally, we turn to linear regression with missing observations and show that such a gap does not persist. Indeed, in this setting we show that minimizing a simple, strongly convex empirical risk nearly achieves the information-theoretic lower bound in polynomial time.