We assume data independently sampled from a mixture distribution on the unit ball of the D-dimensional Euclidean space with K+1 components: the first component is a uniform distribution on that ball representing outliers and the other K components are uniform distributions along K d-dimensional linear subspaces restricted to that ball. We study both the simultaneous recovery of all K underlying subspaces and the recovery of the best l0 subspace (i.e., with largest number of points) by minimizing the lp-averaged distances of data points from d-dimensional subspaces of the D-dimensional space. Unlike other lp minimization problems, this minimization is non-convex for all p>0 and thus requires different methods for its analysis. We show that if 0 1 and p>1, then we show that both all underlying subspaces and the best l0 subspace cannot be recovered and even nearly recovered. Further relaxations are also discussed. We use the results of this paper for partially justifying recent effective algorithms for modeling data by mixtures of multiple subspaces as well as for discussing the effect of using variants of lp minimizations in RANSAC-type strategies for single subspace recovery.
Suppose we wish to recover a vector x0 ∈ R m (e.g., a digital signal or image) from incomplete and contaminated observations y = Ax0 + e; A is an n × m The time-frequency and time-scale communities have recently developed a large number of overcomplete waveform dictionaries --- stationary wavelets, wavelet packets, cosine packets, chirplets, and warplets, to name a few. Decomposition into overcomplete systems is not unique, and several methods for decomposition have been proposed, including the method of frames (MOF), Matching pursuit (MP), and, for special dictionaries, the best orthogonal basis (BOB). Basis Pursuit (BP) is a principle for decomposing a signal into an "optimal" superposition of dictionary elements, where optimal means having the smallest l1 norm of coefficients among all such decompositions. We give examples exhibiting several advantages over MOF, MP, and BOB, including better sparsity and superresolution. BP has interesting relations to ideas in areas as diverse as ill-posed problems, in abstract harmonic analysis, total variation denoising, and multiscale edge denoising. BP in highly overcomplete dictionaries leads to large-scale optimization problems. With signals of length 8192 and a wavelet packet dictionary, one gets an equivalent linear program of size 8192 by 212,992. Such problems can be attacked successfully only because of recent advances in linear programming by interior-point methods. We obtain reasonable success with a primal-dual logarithmic barrier method and conjugate-gradient solver. This paper considers the model problem of reconstructing an object from incomplete frequency samples. Consider a discrete-time signal f spl isin C sup N and a randomly chosen set of frequencies spl Omega . Is it possible to reconstruct f from the partial knowledge of its Fourier coefficients on the set spl Omega ? A typical result of this paper is as follows. Suppose that f is a superposition of |T| spikes f(t)= spl sigma sub spl tau spl isin T f( spl tau ) spl delta (t- spl tau ) obeying |T| spl les C sub M spl middot (log N) sup -1 spl middot | spl Omega | for some constant C sub M >0. We do not know the locations of the spikes nor their amplitudes. Then with probability at least 1-O(N sup -M ), f can be reconstructed exactly as the solution to the spl lscr sub 1 minimization problem. In short, exact recovery may be obtained by solving a convex optimization problem. We give numerical values for C sub M which depend on the desired probability of success. Our result may be interpreted as a novel kind of nonlinear sampling theorem. In effect, it says that any signal made out of |T| spikes may be recovered by convex programming from almost every set of frequencies of size O(|T| spl middot logN). Moreover, this is nearly optimal in the sense that any method succeeding with probability 1-O(N sup -M ) would in general require a number of frequency samples at least proportional to |T| spl middot logN. The methodology extends to a variety of other situations and higher dimensions. For example, we show how one can reconstruct a piecewise constant (one- or two-dimensional) object from incomplete frequency samples - provided that the number of jumps (discontinuities) obeys the condition above - by minimizing other convex functionals such as the total variation of f. Given a dictionary D = dk of vectors dk, we seek to represent a signal S as a linear combination S = ∑k γ(k)dk, with scalar coefficients γ(k). In particular, we aim for the sparsest representation possible. In general, this requires a combinatorial optimization process. Previous work considered the special case where D is an overcomplete system consisting of exactly two orthobases and has shown that, under a condition of mutual incoherence of the two bases, and assuming that S has a sufficiently sparse representation, this representation is unique and can be found by solving a convex optimization problem: specifically, minimizing the l1 norm of the coefficients γ. In this article, we obtain parallel results in a more general setting, where the dictionary D can arise from two or several bases, frames, or even less structured systems. We sketch three applications: separating linear features from planar ones in 3D data, noncooperative multiuser encoding, and identification of over-complete independent component models. We consider inexact linear equations y ≈ Φx where y is a given vector in R n , Φ is a given n x m matrix, and we wish to find x 0,∈ as sparse as possible while obeying ∥y - Φx 0,∈ ∥ 2 ≤ ∈. In general, this requires combinatorial optimization and so is considered intractable. On the other hand, the l 1 -minimization problem min ∥x∥ 1 subject to ∥y - Φx∥ 2 ≤ e is convex and is considered tractable. We show that for most Φ, if the optimally sparse approximation x 0,∈ is sufficiently sparse, then the solution x 1,∈ of the l 1 -minimization problem is a good approximation to x 0,∈ . We suppose that the columns of Φ are normalized to the unit l 2 -norm, and we place uniform measure on such Φ. We study the underdetermined case where m ∼ τn and τ > 1, and prove the existence of p = p(r) > 0 and C = C(p, τ) so that for large n and for all Φ's except a negligible fraction, the following approximate sparse solution property of Φ holds: for every y having an approximation ∥y - Φx 0 ∥ 2 ≤ ∈ by a coefficient vector x 0 e R m with fewer than ρ · n nonzeros, ∥x 1,∈ - x 0 ∥ 2 ≤ C ≤ ∈. This has two implications. First, for most Φ, whenever the combinatorial optimization result x 0,∈ would be very sparse, x 1,∈ is a good approximation to x 0,∈ . Second, suppose we are given noisy data obeying y = Φx 0 + z where the unknown x 0 is known to be sparse and the noise ∥z∥ 2 ≤ ∈. For most Φ, noise-tolerant l 1 -minimization will stably recover x 0 from y in the presence of noise z. We also study the barely determined case m = n and reach parallel conclusions by slightly different arguments. Proof techniques include the use of almost-spherical sections in Banach space theory and concentration of measure for eigenvalues of random matrices. We consider linear equations y = Φx where y is a given vector in ℝn and Φ is a given n × m matrix with n 0 so that for large n and for all Φ's except a negligible fraction, the following property holds: For every y having a representation y = Φx0by a coefficient vector x0 ∈ ℝmwith fewer than ρ · n nonzeros, the solution x1of the 1-minimization problem is unique and equal to x0. In contrast, heuristic attempts to sparsely solve such systems—greedy algorithms and thresholding—perform poorly in this challenging setting. The techniques include the use of random proportional embeddings and almost-spherical sections in Banach space theory, and deviation bounds for the eigenvalues of random Wishart matrices. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.