Adaptive shrinkage of singular values.

Summary To estimate a low rank matrix from noisy observations, truncated singular value decomposition has been extensively used and studied: empirical singular values are hard thresholded and empirical singular vectors remain untouched. Recent estimators not only truncate but also shrink the singular values. In the same vein, we propose a continuum of thresholding and shrinking functions that encompasses hard and soft thresholding. To avoid an unstable and costly cross-validation search of their thresholding and shrinking parameters, we propose new rules to select these two regularization parameters from the data. In particular we propose a generalized Stein unbiased risk estimation criterion that does not require knowledge of the variance of the noise and that is computationally fast. A Monte Carlo simulation reveals that our estimator outperforms the tested methods in terms of mean squared error and rank estimation.