  In several online prediction problems of recent interest the comparison class
is composed of matrices with bounded entries. For example, in the online
max-cut problem, the comparison class is matrices which represent cuts of a
given graph and in online gambling the comparison class is matrices which
represent permutations over n teams. Another important example is online
collaborative filtering in which a widely used comparison class is the set of
matrices with a small trace norm. In this paper we isolate a property of
matrices, which we call (beta,tau)-decomposability, and derive an efficient
online learning algorithm, that enjoys a regret bound of O*(sqrt(beta tau T))
for all problems in which the comparison class is composed of
(beta,tau)-decomposable matrices. By analyzing the decomposability of cut
matrices, triangular matrices, and low trace-norm matrices, we derive near
optimal regret bounds for online max-cut, online gambling, and online
collaborative filtering. In particular, this resolves (in the affirmative) an
open problem posed by Abernethy (2010); Kleinberg et al (2010). Finally, we
derive lower bounds for the three problems and show that our upper bounds are
optimal up to logarithmic factors. In particular, our lower bound for the
online collaborative filtering problem resolves another open problem posed by
Shamir and Srebro (2011).
