We establish theoretical recovery guarantees of a family of Riemannian optimization algorithms for low rank matrix recovery, which is about recovering an $m\times n$ rank $r$ matrix from $p < mn$ number of linear measurements. The algorithms are first interpreted as iterative hard thresholding algorithms with subspace projections. Based on this connection, we show that provided the restricted isometry constant $R_{3r}$ of the sensing operator is less than $C_\kappa /\sqrt{r}$, the Riemannian gradient descent algorithm and a restarted variant of the Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm are guaranteed to converge linearly to the underlying rank $r$ matrix if they are initialized by one step hard thresholding. Empirical evaluation shows that the algorithms are able to recover a low rank matrix from nearly the minimum number of measurements necessary.

We study the Riemannian optimization methods on the embedded manifold of low rank matrices for the problem of matrix completion, which is about recovering a low rank matrix from its partial entries. Assume $m$ entries of an $n\times n$ rank $r$ matrix are sampled independently and uniformly with replacement. We first prove that with high probability the Riemannian gradient descent and conjugate gradient descent algorithms initialized by one step hard thresholding are guaranteed to converge linearly to the measured matrix provided \begin{align*} m\geq C_\kappa n^{1.5}r\log^{1.5}(n), \end{align*} where $C_\kappa$ is a numerical constant depending on the condition number of the underlying matrix. The sampling complexity has been further improved to \begin{align*} m\geq C_\kappa nr^2\log^{2}(n) \end{align*} via the resampled Riemannian gradient descent initialization. The analysis of the new initialization procedure relies on an asymmetric restricted isometry property of the sampling operator and the curvature of the low rank matrix manifold. Numerical simulation shows that the algorithms are able to recover a low rank matrix from nearly the minimum number of measurements.