  Recently, the robustification of principal component analysis has attracted
lots of attention from statisticians, engineers and computer scientists. In
this work we study the type of outliers that are not necessarily apparent in
the original observation space but can seriously affect the principal subspace
estimation. Based on a mathematical formulation of such transformed outliers, a
novel robust orthogonal complement principal component analysis (ROC-PCA) is
proposed. The framework combines the popular sparsity-enforcing and low rank
regularization techniques to deal with row-wise outliers as well as
element-wise outliers. A non-asymptotic oracle inequality guarantees the
accuracy and high breakdown performance of ROC-PCA in finite samples. To tackle
the computational challenges, an efficient algorithm is developed on the basis
of Stiefel manifold optimization and iterative thresholding. Furthermore, a
batch variant is proposed to significantly reduce the cost in ultra high
dimensions. The paper also points out a pitfall of a common practice of SVD
reduction in robust PCA. Experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of
ROC-PCA in both synthetic and real data.
