Application of Robust PCA with a structured outlier matrix to topology estimation in power grids

Robust PCA is a widely used technique for Principal Component Analysis when the data is corrupted by outliers. The goal of the present short note is to report on the performance results of a simple modification of the method of Netrapali et al. for estimating Low Rank + Sparse models where the sparse matrix has the structure of a tree. We demonstrate the efficiency of the approach on the problem of estimating the topology in power grid networks.