Reduce and Boost: Recovering Arbitrary Sets of Jointly Sparse Vectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach for recovering infinite sets of jointly sparse vectors efficiently, using a reduction to finite problems and an empirical boosting strategy that outperforms existing methods.

Contribution

It extends sparse recovery techniques to infinite sets and proposes a boosting method to enhance recovery performance and speed.

Findings

Exact recovery of infinite and uncountable sets without discretization.

Boosting strategy improves recovery rate over existing methods.

Method outperforms discretization techniques in run time and accuracy.

Abstract

The rapid developing area of compressed sensing suggests that a sparse vector lying in an arbitrary high dimensional space can be accurately recovered from only a small set of non-adaptive linear measurements. Under appropriate conditions on the measurement matrix, the entire information about the original sparse vector is captured in the measurements, and can be recovered using efficient polynomial methods. The vector model has been extended to a finite set of sparse vectors sharing a common non-zero location set. In this paper, we treat a broader framework in which the goal is to recover a possibly infinite set of jointly sparse vectors. Extending existing recovery methods to this model is difficult due to the infinite structure of the sparse vector set. Instead, we prove that the entire infinite set of sparse vectors can recovered by solving a single, reduced-size finite-dimensional problem, corresponding to recovery of a finite set of sparse vectors. We then show that the problem can be further reduced to the basic recovery of a single sparse vector by randomly combining the measurement vectors. Our approach results in exact recovery of both countable and uncountable sets as it does not rely on discretization or heuristic techniques. To efficiently recover the single sparse vector produced by the last reduction step, we suggest an empirical boosting strategy that improves the recovery ability of any given sub-optimal method for recovering a sparse vector. Numerical experiments on random data demonstrate that when applied to infinite sets our strategy outperforms discretization techniques in terms of both run time and empirical recovery rate. In the finite model, our boosting algorithm is characterized by fast run time and superior recovery rate than known popular methods.