  It is the main goal of this paper to propose a novel method to perform matrix
completion on-line. Motivated by a wide variety of applications, ranging from
the design of recommender systems to sensor network localization through
seismic data reconstruction, we consider the matrix completion problem when
entries of the matrix of interest are observed gradually. Precisely, we place
ourselves in the situation where the predictive rule should be refined
incrementally, rather than recomputed from scratch each time the sample of
observed entries increases. The extension of existing matrix completion methods
to the sequential prediction context is indeed a major issue in the Big Data
era, and yet little addressed in the literature. The algorithm promoted in this
article builds upon the Soft Impute approach introduced in Mazumder et al.
(2010). The major novelty essentially arises from the use of a randomised
technique for both computing and updating the Singular Value Decomposition
(SVD) involved in the algorithm. Though of disarming simplicity, the method
proposed turns out to be very efficient, while requiring reduced computations.
Several numerical experiments based on real datasets illustrating its
performance are displayed, together with preliminary results giving it a
theoretical basis.
