  Matrix completion is a problem that arises in many data-analysis settings
where the input consists of a partially-observed matrix (e.g., recommender
systems, traffic matrix analysis etc.). Classical approaches to matrix
completion assume that the input partially-observed matrix is low rank. The
success of these methods depends on the number of observed entries and the rank
of the matrix; the larger the rank, the more entries need to be observed in
order to accurately complete the matrix. In this paper, we deal with matrices
that are not necessarily low rank themselves, but rather they contain low-rank
submatrices. We propose Targeted, which is a general framework for completing
such matrices. In this framework, we first extract the low-rank submatrices and
then apply a matrix-completion algorithm to these low-rank submatrices as well
as the remainder matrix separately. Although for the completion itself we use
state-of-the-art completion methods, our results demonstrate that Targeted
achieves significantly smaller reconstruction errors than other classical
matrix-completion methods. One of the key technical contributions of the paper
lies in the identification of the low-rank submatrices from the input
partially-observed matrices.
