This paper considers the model problem of reconstructing an object from incomplete frequency samples. Consider a discrete-time signal and a randomly chosen set of frequencies. Is it possible to reconstruct from the partial knowledge of its Fourier coefficients on the set? A typical result of this paper is as follows. Suppose that is a superposition of spikes @ Aa @ A @ A obeying @�� � A I for some constant H. We do not know the locations of the spikes nor their amplitudes. Then with probability at least I @ A, can be reconstructed exactly as the solution to the I minimization problem I aH @ A s.t. ” @ Aa ” @ A for all

This paper studies a difficult and fundamental problem that arises throughout electrical engineering, applied mathematics, and statistics. Suppose that one forms a short linear combination of elementary signals drawn from a large, fixed collection. Given an observation of the linear combination that has been contaminated with additive noise, the goal is to identify which elementary signals participated and to approximate their coefficients. Although many algorithms have been proposed, there is little theory which guarantees that these algorithms can accurately and efficiently solve the problem. This paper studies a method called convex relaxation, which attempts to recover the ideal sparse signal by solving a convex program. This approach is powerful because the optimization can be completed in polynomial time with standard scientific software. The paper provides general conditions which ensure that convex relaxation succeeds. As evidence of the broad impact of these results, the paper describes how convex relaxation can be used for several concrete signal recovery problems. It also describes applications to channel coding, linear regression, and numerical analysis.

A full-rank matrix A ∈ IR n×m with n < m generates an underdetermined system of linear equations Ax = b having infinitely many solutions. Suppose we seek the sparsest solution, i.e., the one with the fewest nonzero entries: can it ever be unique? If so, when? As optimization of sparsity is combinatorial in nature, are there efficient methods for finding the sparsest solution? These questions have been answered positively and constructively in recent years, exposing a wide variety of surprising phenomena; in particular, the existence of easily-verifiable conditions under which optimally-sparse solutions can be found by concrete, effective computational methods. Such theoretical results inspire a bold perspective on some important practical problems in signal and image processing. Several well-known signal and image processing problems can be cast as demanding solutions of undetermined systems of equations. Such problems have previously seemed, to many, intractable. There is considerable evidence that these problems often have sparse solutions. Hence, advances in finding sparse solutions to underdetermined systems energizes research on such signal and image processing problems – to striking effect. In this paper we review the theoretical results on sparse solutions of linear systems, empirical

Abstract. Subset selection and sparse approximation problems request a good approximation of an input signal using a linear combination of elementary signals, yet they stipulate that the approximation may only involve a few of the elementary signals. This class of problems arises throughout electrical engineering, applied mathematics and statistics, but small theoretical progress has been made over the last fifty years. Subset selection and sparse approximation both admit natural convex relaxations, but the literature contains few results on the behavior of these relaxations for general input signals. This report demonstrates that the solution of the convex program frequently coincides with the solution of the original approximation problem. The proofs depend essentially on geometric properties of the ensemble of elementary signals. The results are powerful because sparse approximation problems are combinatorial, while convex programs can be solved in polynomial time with standard software. Comparable new results for a greedy algorithm, Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, are also stated. This report should have a major practical impact because the theory applies immediately to many real-world signal processing problems. 1.

It is now well understood that (1) it is possible to reconstruct sparse signals exactly from what appear to be highly incomplete sets of linear measurements and (2) that this can be done by constrained ℓ1 minimization. In this paper, we study a novel method for sparse signal recovery that in many situations outperforms ℓ1 minimization in the sense that substantially fewer measurements are needed for exact recovery. The algorithm consists of solving a sequence of weighted ℓ1-minimization problems where the weights used for the next iteration are computed from the value of the current solution. We present a series of experiments demonstrating the remarkable performance and broad applicability of this algorithm in the areas of sparse signal recovery, statistical estimation, error correction and image processing. Interestingly, superior gains are also achieved when our method is applied to recover signals with assumed near-sparsity in overcomplete representations—not by reweighting the ℓ1 norm of the coefficient sequence as is common, but by reweighting the ℓ1 norm of the transformed object. An immediate consequence is the possibility of highly efficient data acquisition protocols by improving on a technique known as compressed sensing.

We consider the fundamental problem of estimating the mean of a vector y = Xβ + z, where X is an n × p design matrix in which one can have far more variables than observations and z is a stochastic error term—the so-called ‘p> n ’ setup. When β is sparse, or more generally, when there is a sparse subset of covariates providing a close approximation to the unknown mean vector, we ask whether or not it is possible to accurately estimate Xβ using a computationally tractable algorithm. We show that in a surprisingly wide range of situations, the lasso happens to nearly select the best subset of variables. Quantitatively speaking, we prove that solving a simple quadratic program achieves a squared error within a logarithmic factor of the ideal mean squared error one would achieve with an oracle supplying perfect information about which variables should be included in the model and which variables should not. Interestingly, our results describe the average performance of the lasso; that is, the performance one can expect in an vast majority of cases where Xβ is a sparse or nearly sparse superposition of variables, but not in all cases. Our results are nonasymptotic and widely applicable since they simply require that pairs of predictor variables are not too collinear.

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Recent results in homotopy and solution paths demonstrate that certain well-designed greedy algorithms, with a range of values of the algorithmic parameter, can provide solution paths to a sequence of convex optimization problems. On the other hand, in regression many existing criteria in subset selection (including Cp, AIC, BIC, MDL, RIC, etc.) involve optimizing an objective function that contains a counting measure. The two optimization problems are formulated as (P1) and(P0) in the present paper. The latter is generally combinatoric and has been proven to be NP-hard. We study the conditions under which the two optimization problems have common solutions. Hence, in these situations a stepwise algorithm can be used to solve the seemingly unsolvable problem. Our main result is motivated by recent work in sparse representation, while two others emerge from different angles: a direct analysis of sufficiency and necessity and a condition on the mostly correlated covariates. An extreme example connected with least angle regression is of independent interest. 1. Introduction. We

In this paper we consider a mobile cooperative network that is tasked with building a map of the received signal strength to a fixed station. By using the recent results in the area of compressed sensing, we show how the nodes can exploit the sparse representation of the channel’s spatial variations to build a map of the signal strength with minimal sensing. We furthermore propose a successive interference cancellation method for signal reconstruction based on a considerably incomplete set of measurements. The proposed method is an extension of the existing signal reconstruction strategies but with a considerably better performance. Finally, we present simulation results that show the performance of the proposed framework.

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