Minimax rate of convergence and the performance of ERM in phase recovery

Abstract: We study the performance of Empirical Risk Minimization in noisy phase retrieval problems, indexed by subsets of $\R^n$ and relative to subgaussian sampling; that is, when the given data is $y_i=\inr{a_i,x_0}^2+w_i$ for a subgaussian random vector $a$, independent noise $w$ and a fixed but unknown $x_0$ that belongs to a given subset of $\R^n$. We show that ERM produces $\hat{x}$ whose Euclidean distance to either $x_0$ or $-x_0$ depends on the gaussian mean-width of the indexing set and on the signal-to-noise ratio of the problem. The bound coincides with the one for linear regression when $|x_0|_2$ is of the order of a constant. In addition, we obtain a minimax lower bound for the problem and identify sets for which ERM is a minimax procedure. As examples, we study the class of $d$-sparse vectors in $\R^n$ and the unit ball in $\ell_1^n$.