This article proposes diffusion LMS strategies for distributed estimation
over adaptive networks that are able to exploit sparsity in the underlying
system model. The approach relies on convex regularization, common in
compressive sensing, to enhance the detection of sparsity via a diffusive
process over the network. The resulting algorithms endow networks with learning
abilities and allow them to learn the sparse structure from the incoming data
in real-time, and also to track variations in the sparsity of the model. We
provide convergence and mean-square performance analysis of the proposed method
and show under what conditions it outperforms the unregularized diffusion
version. We also show how to adaptively select the regularization parameter.
Simulation results illustrate the advantage of the proposed filters for sparse
data recovery.Comment: to appear in IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, 201