Maximum likelihood for high-noise group orbit estimation and single-particle cryo-EM

Abstract

Motivated by applications to single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), we study several problems of function estimation in a high noise regime, where samples are observed after random rotation and possible linear projection of the function domain. We describe a stratification of the Fisher information eigenvalues according to transcendence degrees of graded pieces of the algebra of group invariants, and we relate critical points of the log-likelihood landscape to a sequence of moment optimization problems, extending previous results for a discrete rotation group without projections.

We then compute the transcendence degrees and forms of these optimization problems for several examples of function estimation under $\mathsf{SO}(2)$ and $\mathsf{SO}(3)$ rotations, including a simplified model of cryo-EM as introduced by Bandeira, Blum-Smith, Kileel, Niles-Weed, Perry and Wein. We affirmatively resolve conjectures that third-order moments are sufficient to locally identify a generic signal up to its rotational orbit in these examples.

For low-dimensional approximations of the electric potential maps of two small protein molecules, we empirically verify that the noise scalings of the Fisher information eigenvalues conform with our theoretical predictions over a range of SNR, in a model of $\mathsf{SO}(3)$ rotations without projections.