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

Oracle-order Recovery Performance of Greedy Pursuits with Replacement against General Perturbations

Applying the theory of compressive sensing in practice always takes different kinds of perturbations into consideration. In this paper, the recovery performance of greedy pursuits with replacement for sparse recovery is analyzed when both the measurement vector and the sensing matrix are contaminated with additive perturbations. Specifically, greedy pursuits with replacement include three algorithms, compressive sampling matching pursuit (CoSaMP), subspace pursuit (SP), and iterative hard thresholding (IHT), where the support estimation is evaluated and updated in each iteration. Based on restricted isometry property, a unified form of the error bounds of these recovery algorithms is derived under general perturbations for compressible signals. The results reveal that the recovery performance is stable against both perturbations. In addition, these bounds are compared with that of oracle recovery--- least squares solution with the locations of some largest entries in magnitude known a priori. The comparison shows that the error bounds of these algorithms only differ in coefficients from the lower bound of oracle recovery for some certain signal and perturbations, as reveals that oracle-order recovery performance of greedy pursuits with replacement is guaranteed. Numerical simulations are performed to verify the conclusions.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures, 5 table

Submodular meets Spectral: Greedy Algorithms for Subset Selection, Sparse Approximation and Dictionary Selection

We study the problem of selecting a subset of k random variables from a large set, in order to obtain the best linear prediction of another variable of interest. This problem can be viewed in the context of both feature selection and sparse approximation. We analyze the performance of widely used greedy heuristics, using insights from the maximization of submodular functions and spectral analysis. We introduce the submodularity ratio as a key quantity to help understand why greedy algorithms perform well even when the variables are highly correlated. Using our techniques, we obtain the strongest known approximation guarantees for this problem, both in terms of the submodularity ratio and the smallest k-sparse eigenvalue of the covariance matrix. We further demonstrate the wide applicability of our techniques by analyzing greedy algorithms for the dictionary selection problem, and significantly improve the previously known guarantees. Our theoretical analysis is complemented by experiments on real-world and synthetic data sets; the experiments show that the submodularity ratio is a stronger predictor of the performance of greedy algorithms than other spectral parameters