Rong Ge princeton
rongge
I'm a 4th year graduate student at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University. My research area is Theoretical Computer Science. My advisor is Sanjeev Arora.
Recent Work

Recently I've been working on nonnegative matrix factorization with Sanjeev Arora, Ravi Kannan and Ankur Moitra. We are generally interested in the meta problem: machine learning people have been applying heuristic algorithms such as local search or EM type algorithm to find solutions to many hard problems. Are these problems really easy or hard? If they are easy can we use algorithms with provable guarantees; if they are hard is there any reasonable model where they become easy or even the known heuristic algorithms can be proved to work? 


Publications
Computing a Nonnegative Matrix Factorization --- Provably manuscript

with Sanjeev Arora, Ravi Kannan and Ankur Moitra. In STOC 2012, to appear.

The nonnegative matrix factorization problem asks for factorizing an n*m matrix M into AW where A is n*r and W is r*m, further the entries of the two matrices A and W are required to be nonnegative. This problem has a extremely broad range of applications, from machine learning to communication complexity. We give algorithms for exact and approximate versions of the problem when r is small (which is the case for most applications) and a hardness result that shows our results cannot be substancially improved.

Finding Overlapping Communities in Social Networks: Toward a Rigorous Approach manuscript

with Sanjeev Arora, Sushant Sachdeva and Grant Schoenebeck, Submitted.

A community in a social network is usually understood to be a group of nodes more densely connected with each other than with the rest of the network. Many existing methods for finding them use heuristic algorithms where the solution concept is defined in terms of an NP-complete problem such as CLIQUE or HIERARCHICAL CLUSTERING. We introduce a more formal approach whereby we make rigorous definitions that sidestep the pitfall of high computational complexity and allow efficient algorithms for finding communities.

Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products

with Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak and Markus Brunnermeier. In ICS 2010

A short version appeared in Communications of the ACM, 2011 Issue 5.
Full text PDF

See some blog comments on this paper: Intractability Center, Freedom to Tinker, Boing Boing, Daily Kos, In Theory, Healthy Algorithms, Lipton's blog

We put forward the issue of Computational Complexity in the analysis of Financial Derivatives, and show that there is a fundamental difficulty in pricing financial derivatives even in very simple settings.

This is still a working paper. The latest version (updated Jan. 2012) can be found here:
Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in
Financial Products


For some frequently asked questions about the paper, see our FAQ page.

New Tools for Graph Coloring PDF

with Sanjeev Arora, In APPROX 2011

We explore the possibility of better coloring algorithm using the new concept threshold rank. We are able to analyze high level Lasserre Relaxations for low threshold rank graphs and distance transitive graphs, and our algorithm makes significantly better progress (towards O(log n) coloring) in these cases compared to previous algorithms (where the number of colors is polynomial). We also purpose a plausible conjecture, that if true would yield good sub-exponential time algorithm for graph coloring.

New Algorithms for Learning in Presence of Errors PDF

with Sanjeev Arora, In ICALP 2011

We give new algorithms for a variety of randomly-generated instances of computational problems using a linearization technique that reduces to solving a system of linear equations. Our techniques can be applied to the low noise case of the well-known LWE (Learning With Errors) problem, giving a slightly subexponential time algorithm which suggests known hardness results are almost tight.

New Results on Simple Stochastic Games PDF

with Decheng Dai. In ISAAC 2009

We give a new algorithm for Simple Stochastic Games when the number of RANDOM vertices is small. We also show that coarse approximation is as hard as fine approximation for Simple Stochastic Games.

Contact
Email: rongge AT cs DOT princeton DOT edu
Office: 216 Computer Science Building
Phone: (609) 258-5389 (office)
Mail: Department of Computer Science
Princeton University
35 Olden Street
Princeton, NJ 08540-5233