Lifting high-dimensional nonlinear models with Gaussian regressors

Abstract: We study the problem of recovering a structured signal $\mathbf{x}0$ from high-dimensional data $\mathbf{y}_i=f(\mathbf{a}_i^T\mathbf{x}_0)$ for some nonlinear (and potentially unknown) link function $f$, when the regressors $\mathbf{a}_i$ are iid Gaussian. Brillinger (1982) showed that ordinary least-squares estimates $\mathbf{x}_0$ up to a constant of proportionality $\mu\ell$, which depends on $f$. Recently, Plan & Vershynin (2015) extended this result to the high-dimensional setting deriving sharp error bounds for the generalized Lasso. Unfortunately, both least-squares and the Lasso fail to recover $\mathbf{x}0$ when $\mu\ell=0$. For example, this includes all even link functions. We resolve this issue by proposing and analyzing an alternative convex recovery method. In a nutshell, our method treats such link functions as if they were linear in a lifted space of higher-dimension. Interestingly, our error analysis captures the effect of both the nonlinearity and the problem's geometry in a few simple summary parameters.