  Canonical correlation analysis is a classical technique for exploring the
relationship between two sets of variables. It has important applications in
analyzing high dimensional datasets originated from genomics, imaging and other
fields. This paper considers adaptive minimax and computationally tractable
estimation of leading sparse canonical coefficient vectors in high dimensions.
First, we establish separate minimax estimation rates for canonical coefficient
vectors of each set of random variables under no structural assumption on
marginal covariance matrices. Second, we propose a computationally feasible
estimator to attain the optimal rates adaptively under an additional sample
size condition. Finally, we show that a sample size condition of this kind is
needed for any randomized polynomial-time estimator to be consistent, assuming
hardness of certain instances of the Planted Clique detection problem. The
result is faithful to the Gaussian models used in the paper. As a byproduct, we
obtain the first computational lower bounds for sparse PCA under the Gaussian
single spiked covariance model.
