49,249 research outputs found
Sparse spectral estimation from point process observations
We consider the problem of estimating the power spectral density of the neural covariates underlying the spiking of a neuronal population. We assume the spiking of the neuronal ensemble to be described by Bernoulli statistics. Furthermore, we consider the conditional intensity function to be the logistic map of a second-order stationary process with sparse frequency content. Using the binary spiking data recorded from the population, we calculate the maximum a posteriori estimate of the power spectral density of the process while enforcing sparsity-promoting priors on the estimate. Using both simulated and clinically recorded data, we show that our method outperforms the existing methods for extracting a frequency domain representation from the spiking data of a neuronal population
Sparse component separation for accurate CMB map estimation
The Cosmological Microwave Background (CMB) is of premier importance for the
cosmologists to study the birth of our universe. Unfortunately, most CMB
experiments such as COBE, WMAP or Planck do not provide a direct measure of the
cosmological signal; CMB is mixed up with galactic foregrounds and point
sources. For the sake of scientific exploitation, measuring the CMB requires
extracting several different astrophysical components (CMB, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich
clusters, galactic dust) form multi-wavelength observations. Mathematically
speaking, the problem of disentangling the CMB map from the galactic
foregrounds amounts to a component or source separation problem. In the field
of CMB studies, a very large range of source separation methods have been
applied which all differ from each other in the way they model the data and the
criteria they rely on to separate components. Two main difficulties are i) the
instrument's beam varies across frequencies and ii) the emission laws of most
astrophysical components vary across pixels. This paper aims at introducing a
very accurate modeling of CMB data, based on sparsity, accounting for beams
variability across frequencies as well as spatial variations of the components'
spectral characteristics. Based on this new sparse modeling of the data, a
sparsity-based component separation method coined Local-Generalized
Morphological Component Analysis (L-GMCA) is described. Extensive numerical
experiments have been carried out with simulated Planck data. These experiments
show the high efficiency of the proposed component separation methods to
estimate a clean CMB map with a very low foreground contamination, which makes
L-GMCA of prime interest for CMB studies.Comment: submitted to A&
Characterization and Inference of Graph Diffusion Processes from Observations of Stationary Signals
Many tools from the field of graph signal processing exploit knowledge of the
underlying graph's structure (e.g., as encoded in the Laplacian matrix) to
process signals on the graph. Therefore, in the case when no graph is
available, graph signal processing tools cannot be used anymore. Researchers
have proposed approaches to infer a graph topology from observations of signals
on its nodes. Since the problem is ill-posed, these approaches make
assumptions, such as smoothness of the signals on the graph, or sparsity
priors. In this paper, we propose a characterization of the space of valid
graphs, in the sense that they can explain stationary signals. To simplify the
exposition in this paper, we focus here on the case where signals were i.i.d.
at some point back in time and were observed after diffusion on a graph. We
show that the set of graphs verifying this assumption has a strong connection
with the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix, and forms a convex set. Along
with a theoretical study in which these eigenvectors are assumed to be known,
we consider the practical case when the observations are noisy, and
experimentally observe how fast the set of valid graphs converges to the set
obtained when the exact eigenvectors are known, as the number of observations
grows. To illustrate how this characterization can be used for graph recovery,
we present two methods for selecting a particular point in this set under
chosen criteria, namely graph simplicity and sparsity. Additionally, we
introduce a measure to evaluate how much a graph is adapted to signals under a
stationarity assumption. Finally, we evaluate how state-of-the-art methods
relate to this framework through experiments on a dataset of temperatures.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing
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Detecting and quantifying stellar magnetic fields -- Sparse Stokes profile approximation using orthogonal matching pursuit
In the recent years, we have seen a rapidly growing number of stellar
magnetic field detections for various types of stars. Many of these magnetic
fields are estimated from spectropolarimetric observations (Stokes V) by using
the so-called center-of-gravity (COG) method. Unfortunately, the accuracy of
this method rapidly deteriorates with increasing noise and thus calls for a
more robust procedure that combines signal detection and field estimation. We
introduce an estimation method that provides not only the effective or mean
longitudinal magnetic field from an observed Stokes V profile but also uses the
net absolute polarization of the profile to obtain an estimate of the apparent
(i.e., velocity resolved) absolute longitudinal magnetic field. By combining
the COG method with an orthogonal-matching-pursuit (OMP) approach, we were able
to decompose observed Stokes profiles with an overcomplete dictionary of
wavelet-basis functions to reliably reconstruct the observed Stokes profiles in
the presence of noise. The elementary wave functions of the sparse
reconstruction process were utilized to estimate the effective longitudinal
magnetic field and the apparent absolute longitudinal magnetic field. A
multiresolution analysis complements the OMP algorithm to provide a robust
detection and estimation method. An extensive Monte-Carlo simulation confirms
the reliability and accuracy of the magnetic OMP approach.Comment: A&A, in press, 15 pages, 14 figure
Grid-free compressive beamforming
The direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem involves the localization
of a few sources from a limited number of observations on an array of sensors,
thus it can be formulated as a sparse signal reconstruction problem and solved
efficiently with compressive sensing (CS) to achieve high-resolution imaging.
On a discrete angular grid, the CS reconstruction degrades due to basis
mismatch when the DOAs do not coincide with the angular directions on the grid.
To overcome this limitation, a continuous formulation of the DOA problem is
employed and an optimization procedure is introduced, which promotes sparsity
on a continuous optimization variable. The DOA estimation problem with
infinitely many unknowns, i.e., source locations and amplitudes, is solved over
a few optimization variables with semidefinite programming. The grid-free CS
reconstruction provides high-resolution imaging even with non-uniform arrays,
single-snapshot data and under noisy conditions as demonstrated on experimental
towed array data.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, journal pape
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