Title: Estimation under group actions: recovering orbits from invariants,
Abstract: Motivated by geometric problems in signal processing, computer vision, and
structural biology, we study a class of orbit recovery problems where we
observe very noisy copies of an unknown signal, each acted upon by a random
element of some group (such as Z/p or SO(3)). The goal is to recover the orbit
of the signal under the group action in the high-noise regime. This generalizes
problems of interest such as multi-reference alignment (MRA) and the
reconstruction problem in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). We obtain
matching lower and upper bounds on the sample complexity of these problems in
high generality, showing that the statistical difficulty is intricately
determined by the invariant theory of the underlying symmetry group.
In particular, we determine that for cryo-EM with noise variance $\sigma^2$
and uniform viewing directions, the number of samples required scales as
$\sigma^6$. We match this bound with a novel algorithm for ab initio
reconstruction in cryo-EM, based on invariant features of degree at most 3. We
further discuss how to recover multiple molecular structures from heterogeneous
cryo-EM samples.