New bounds for circulant Johnson-Lindenstrauss embeddings

This paper analyzes circulant Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) embeddings which, as an important class of structured random JL embeddings, are formed by randomizing the column signs of a circulant matrix generated by a random vector. With the help of recent decoupling techniques and matrix-valued Bernstein inequalities, we obtain a new bound $k=O(\epsilon^{-2}\log^{(1+\delta)} (n))$ for Gaussian circulant JL embeddings. Moreover, by using the Laplace transform technique (also called Bernstein's trick), we extend the result to subgaussian case. The bounds in this paper offer a small improvement over the current best bounds for Gaussian circulant JL embeddings for certain parameter regimes and are derived using more direct methods.Comment: 11 pages; accepted by Communications in Mathematical Science

A Geometric Approach to Covariance Matrix Estimation and its Applications to Radar Problems

A new class of disturbance covariance matrix estimators for radar signal processing applications is introduced following a geometric paradigm. Each estimator is associated with a given unitary invariant norm and performs the sample covariance matrix projection into a specific set of structured covariance matrices. Regardless of the considered norm, an efficient solution technique to handle the resulting constrained optimization problem is developed. Specifically, it is shown that the new family of distribution-free estimators shares a shrinkagetype form; besides, the eigenvalues estimate just requires the solution of a one-dimensional convex problem whose objective function depends on the considered unitary norm. For the two most common norm instances, i.e., Frobenius and spectral, very efficient algorithms are developed to solve the aforementioned one-dimensional optimization leading to almost closed form covariance estimates. At the analysis stage, the performance of the new estimators is assessed in terms of achievable Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) both for a spatial and a Doppler processing assuming different data statistical characterizations. The results show that interesting SINR improvements with respect to some counterparts available in the open literature can be achieved especially in training starved regimes.Comment: submitted for journal publicatio

Maximum of the resolvent over matrices with given spectrum

In numerical analysis it is often necessary to estimate the condition number $CN(T)=||T||_{} \cdot||T^{-1}||_{}$ and the norm of the resolvent $||(\zeta-T)^{-1}||_{}$ of a given $n\times n$ matrix $T$. We derive new spectral estimates for these quantities and compute explicit matrices that achieve our bounds. We recover the well-known fact that the supremum of $CN(T)$ over all matrices with $||T||_{} \leq1$ and minimal absolute eigenvalue $r=\min_{i=1,...,n}|\lambda_{i}|>0$ is the Kronecker bound $\frac{1}{r^{n}}$. This result is subsequently generalized by computing the corresponding supremum of $||(\zeta-T)^{-1}||_{}$ for any $|\zeta| \leq1$. We find that the supremum is attained by a triangular Toeplitz matrix. This provides a simple class of structured matrices on which condition numbers and resolvent norm bounds can be studied numerically. The occuring Toeplitz matrices are so-called model matrices, i.e. matrix representations of the compressed backward shift operator on the Hardy space $H_2$ to a finite-dimensional invariant subspace