  The sparsity constrained rank-one matrix approximation problem is a difficult
mathematical optimization problem which arises in a wide array of useful
applications in engineering, machine learning and statistics, and the design of
algorithms for this problem has attracted intensive research activities. We
introduce an algorithmic framework, called ConGradU, that unifies a variety of
seemingly different algorithms that have been derived from disparate
approaches, and allows for deriving new schemes. Building on the old and
well-known conditional gradient algorithm, ConGradU is a simplified version
with unit step size and yields a generic algorithm which either is given by an
analytic formula or requires a very low computational complexity. Mathematical
properties are systematically developed and numerical experiments are given.
