Deterministic Polynomial Time Algorithms for Matrix Completion Problems

Abstract

We present new deterministic algorithms for several cases of the maximum rank matrix completion problem (for short matrix completion), i.e., the problem of assigning values to the variables in a given symbolic matrix to maximize the resulting matrix rank. Matrix completion is one of the fundamental problems in computational complexity. It has numerous important algorithmic applications, among others, in computing dynamic transitive closures or multicast network codings [N. J. A. Harvey, D. R. Karger, and K. Murota, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 2005, pp. 489–498; N. J. A. Harvey, D. R. Karger, and S. Yekhanin, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 2006, pp. 1103–1111]. We design efficient deterministic algorithms for common generalizations of the results of Lovász and Geelen on this problem by allowing linear polynomials in the entries of the input matrix such that the submatrices corresponding to each variable have rank one. Our methods are algebraic and quite different from those of Lovász and Geelen. We look at the problem of matrix completion in the more general setting of linear spaces of linear transformations and find a maximum rank element there using a greedy method. Matrix algebras and modules play a crucial role in the algorithm. We show (hardness) results for special instances of matrix completion naturally related to matrix algebras; i.e., in contrast to computing isomorphisms of modules (for which there is a known deterministic polynomial time algorithm), finding a surjective or an injective homomorphism between two given modules is as hard as the general matrix completion problem. The same hardness holds for finding a maximum dimension cyclic submodule (i.e., generated by a single element). For the “dual” task, i.e., finding the minimal number of generators of a given module, we present a deterministic polynomial time algorithm. The proof methods developed in this paper apply to fairly general modules and could also be of independent interest.