K-median clustering, model-based compressive sensing, and sparse recovery for earth mover distance

We initiate the study of sparse recovery problems under the Earth-Mover Distance (EMD). Specifically, we design a distribution over m x n matrices A such that for any x, given Ax, we can recover a k-sparse approximation to x under the EMD distance. One construction yields m=O(k log (n/k)) and a 1 + ε approximation factor, which matches the best achievable bound for other error measures, such as the l[subscript 1] norm. Our algorithms are obtained by exploiting novel connections to other problems and areas, such as streaming algorithms for k-median clustering and model-based compressive sensing. We also provide novel algorithms and results for the latter problems

Exploiting Prior Knowledge in Compressed Sensing Wireless ECG Systems

Recent results in telecardiology show that compressed sensing (CS) is a promising tool to lower energy consumption in wireless body area networks for electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring. However, the performance of current CS-based algorithms, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality of the ECG, still falls short of the performance attained by state-of-the-art wavelet based algorithms. In this paper, we propose to exploit the structure of the wavelet representation of the ECG signal to boost the performance of CS-based methods for compression and reconstruction of ECG signals. More precisely, we incorporate prior information about the wavelet dependencies across scales into the reconstruction algorithms and exploit the high fraction of common support of the wavelet coefficients of consecutive ECG segments. Experimental results utilizing the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database show that significant performance gains, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality, can be obtained by the proposed algorithms compared to current CS-based methods.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatic

Compressive Parameter Estimation for Sparse Translation-Invariant Signals Using Polar Interpolation

We propose new compressive parameter estimation algorithms that make use of polar interpolation to improve the estimator precision. Our work extends previous approaches involving polar interpolation for compressive parameter estimation in two aspects: (i) we extend the formulation from real non-negative amplitude parameters to arbitrary complex ones, and (ii) we allow for mismatch between the manifold described by the parameters and its polar approximation. To quantify the improvements afforded by the proposed extensions, we evaluate six algorithms for estimation of parameters in sparse translation-invariant signals, exemplified with the time delay estimation problem. The evaluation is based on three performance metrics: estimator precision, sampling rate and computational complexity. We use compressive sensing with all the algorithms to lower the necessary sampling rate and show that it is still possible to attain good estimation precision and keep the computational complexity low. Our numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithms outperform existing approaches that either leverage polynomial interpolation or are based on a conversion to a frequency-estimation problem followed by a super-resolution algorithm. The algorithms studied here provide various tradeoffs between computational complexity, estimation precision, and necessary sampling rate. The work shows that compressive sensing for the class of sparse translation-invariant signals allows for a decrease in sampling rate and that the use of polar interpolation increases the estimation precision.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing; minor edits and correction

Stable, Robust and Super Fast Reconstruction of Tensors Using Multi-Way Projections

In the framework of multidimensional Compressed Sensing (CS), we introduce an analytical reconstruction formula that allows one to recover an $N$th-order $(I_1\times I_2\times \cdots \times I_N)$ data tensor $\underline{\mathbf{X}}$ from a reduced set of multi-way compressive measurements by exploiting its low multilinear-rank structure. Moreover, we show that, an interesting property of multi-way measurements allows us to build the reconstruction based on compressive linear measurements taken only in two selected modes, independently of the tensor order $N$. In addition, it is proved that, in the matrix case and in a particular case with $3$rd-order tensors where the same 2D sensor operator is applied to all mode-3 slices, the proposed reconstruction $\underline{\mathbf{X}}_\tau$ is stable in the sense that the approximation error is comparable to the one provided by the best low-multilinear-rank approximation, where $\tau$ is a threshold parameter that controls the approximation error. Through the analysis of the upper bound of the approximation error we show that, in the 2D case, an optimal value for the threshold parameter $\tau=\tau_0 > 0$ exists, which is confirmed by our simulation results. On the other hand, our experiments on 3D datasets show that very good reconstructions are obtained using $\tau=0$, which means that this parameter does not need to be tuned. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate the stability and robustness of the method when it is applied to real-world 2D and 3D signals. A comparison with state-of-the-arts sparsity based CS methods specialized for multidimensional signals is also included. A very attractive characteristic of the proposed method is that it provides a direct computation, i.e. it is non-iterative in contrast to all existing sparsity based CS algorithms, thus providing super fast computations, even for large datasets.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Computational Methods for Sparse Solution of Linear Inverse Problems

The goal of the sparse approximation problem is to approximate a target signal using a linear combination of a few elementary signals drawn from a fixed collection. This paper surveys the major practical algorithms for sparse approximation. Specific attention is paid to computational issues, to the circumstances in which individual methods tend to perform well, and to the theoretical guarantees available. Many fundamental questions in electrical engineering, statistics, and applied mathematics can be posed as sparse approximation problems, making these algorithms versatile and relevant to a plethora of applications

CSWA: Aggregation-Free Spatial-Temporal Community Sensing

In this paper, we present a novel community sensing paradigm -- {C}ommunity {S}ensing {W}ithout {A}ggregation}. CSWA is designed to obtain the environment information (e.g., air pollution or temperature) in each subarea of the target area, without aggregating sensor and location data collected by community members. CSWA operates on top of a secured peer-to-peer network over the community members and proposes a novel \emph{Decentralized Spatial-Temporal Compressive Sensing} framework based on \emph{Parallelized Stochastic Gradient Descent}. Through learning the \emph{low-rank structure} via distributed optimization, CSWA approximates the value of the sensor data in each subarea (both covered and uncovered) for each sensing cycle using the sensor data locally stored in each member's mobile device. Simulation experiments based on real-world datasets demonstrate that CSWA exhibits low approximation error (i.e., less than $0.2 ^\circ$C in city-wide temperature sensing task and $10$ units of PM2.5 index in urban air pollution sensing) and performs comparably to (sometimes better than) state-of-the-art algorithms based on the data aggregation and centralized computation.Comment: This paper has been accepted by AAAI 2018. First two authors are equally contribute