Efficient and guaranteed algorithms for sparse inverse problems

Compressed sensing is a new data acquisition paradigm enabling universal, simple, and reduced-cost acquisition, by exploiting a sparse signal model. Most notably, recovery of the signal by computationally efficient algorithms is guaranteed for certain randomized acquisition systems. However, there is a discrepancy between the theoretical guarantees and practical applications. In applications, including Fourier imaging in various modalities, the measurements are acquired by inner products with vectors selected randomly (sampled) from a frame. Currently available guarantees are derived using a so-called restricted isometry property (RIP), which has only been shown to hold under ideal assumptions. For example, the sampling from the frame needs to be independent and identically distributed with the uniform distribution, and the frame must be tight. In practice though, one or more of the ideal assumptions is typically violated and none of the existing guarantees applies. Motivated by this discrepancy, we propose two related changes in the existing framework: (i) a generalized RIP called the restricted biorthogonality property (RBOP); and (ii) correspondingly modified versions of existing greedy pursuit algorithms, which we call oblique pursuits. Oblique pursuits are guaranteed using the RBOP without requiring ideal assumptions; hence, the guarantees apply to practical acquisition schemes. Numerical results show that oblique pursuits also perform competitively with, or sometimes better than their conventional counterparts. We also propose robust and efficient algorithms for the joint sparse recovery problem in compressed sensing, which simultaneously recover the supports of jointly sparse signals from their multiple measurement vectors obtained through a common sensing matrix. In a favorable situation, the unknown matrix, which consists of the jointly sparse signals, has linearly independent nonzero rows. In this case, the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm, originally proposed by Schmidt for the direction of arrival estimation problem in sensor array processing and later proposed and analyzed for joint sparse recovery by Feng and Bresler, provides a guarantee with the minimum number of measurements. We focus instead on the unfavorable but practically significant case of rank defect or ill-conditioning. This situation arises with a limited number of measurement vectors, or with highly correlated signal components. In this case, MUSIC fails and, in practice, none of the existing methods can consistently approach the fundamental limit. We propose subspace-augmented MUSIC (SA-MUSIC), which improves on MUSIC so that the support is reliably recovered under such unfavorable conditions. Combined with a subspace-based greedy algorithm, Orthogonal Subspace Matching Pursuit, which is also proposed and analyzed in Chapter 3, SA-MUSIC provides a computationally efficient algorithm with a performance guarantee. The performance guarantees are given in terms of a version of the restricted isometry property. In particular, we also present a non-asymptotic perturbation analysis of the signal subspace estimation step, which has been missing in the previous studies of MUSIC. Finally, we address compressed sensing of a low-rank matrix posing the inverse problem as an approximation problem with a specified target rank of the solution. A simple search over the target rank then provides the minimum rank solution satisfying a prescribed data approximation bound. We propose an atomic decomposition providing an analogy between parsimonious representations of a sparse vector and a low-rank matrix and extending efficient greedy algorithms from the vector to the matrix case. In particular, we propose an efficient and guaranteed algorithm named ADMiRA that extends Needell and Tropp's compressive sampling matching pursuit (CoSaMP) algorithm from the sparse vector to the low-rank matrix case. The performance guarantee is given in terms of the rank-restricted isometry property and bounds both the number of iterations and the error in the approximate solution for the general case of noisy measurements and approximately low-rank solution. With a sparse measurement operator as in the matrix completion problem, the computation in ADMiRA is linear in the number of measurements. Numerical experiments for the matrix completion problem show that, although the rank-restricted isometry property is not satisfied in this case, ADMiRA is a competitive algorithm for matrix completion