The Continuous Relaxation of Sparse PCA is NP-hard

Abstract

Maximizing a symmetric quadratic form under simultaneous L1 norm inequality and L2 norm equality constraints is a standard and widely used continuous relaxation for Sparse Principal Component Analysis (SPCA). This paper settles the computational complexity of this continuous formulation by proving it is NP-hard. Furthermore, the variant with both L1 and L2 norm inequalities is also shown to be NP-hard.