  Matrix completion has been well studied under the uniform sampling model and
the trace-norm regularized methods perform well both theoretically and
numerically in such a setting. However, the uniform sampling model is
unrealistic for a range of applications and the standard trace-norm relaxation
can behave very poorly when the underlying sampling scheme is non-uniform.
  In this paper we propose and analyze a max-norm constrained empirical risk
minimization method for noisy matrix completion under a general sampling model.
The optimal rate of convergence is established under the Frobenius norm loss in
the context of approximately low-rank matrix reconstruction. It is shown that
the max-norm constrained method is minimax rate-optimal and yields a unified
and robust approximate recovery guarantee, with respect to the sampling
distributions. The computational effectiveness of this method is also
discussed, based on first-order algorithms for solving convex optimizations
involving max-norm regularization.
