How many samples are needed to reconstruct a sparse signal?
Well, there are many, many results around some of which you probably know (at least if you are following this blog or this one). Today I write about a neat result which I found quite some time ago on reconstruction of nonnegative sparse signals from a semi-continuous perspective.
1. From discrete sparse reconstruction/compressed sensing to semi-continuous
The basic sparse reconstruction problem asks the following: Say we have a vector
which only has
non-zero entries and a fat matrix
(i.e.
) and consider that we are given measurements
. Of course, the system
is underdetermined. However, we may add a little more prior knowledge on the solution and ask: Is is possible to reconstruct
from
if we know that the vector
is sparse? If yes: How? Under what conditions on
,
,
and
? This question created the expanding universe of compressed sensing recently (and this universe is expanding so fast that for sure there has to be some dark energy in it). As a matter of fact, a powerful method to obtain sparse solutions to underdetermined systems is
-minimization a.k.a. Basis Pursuit on which I blogged recently: Solve

and the important ingredient here is the
-norm of the vector in the objective function.
In this post I’ll formulate semi-continuous sparse reconstruction. We move from an
-vector
to a finite signed measure
on a closed interval (which we assume to be
for simplicty). We may embed the
-vectors into the space of finite signed measures by choosing
points
,
from the interval
and build
with the point-masses (or Dirac measures)
. To a be a bit more precise, we speak about the space
of Radon measures on
, which are defined on the Borel
-algebra of
and are finite. Radon measures are not very scary objects and an intuitive way to think of them is to use Riesz representation: Every Radon measure arises as a continuous linear functional on a space of continuous functions, namely the space
which is the closure of the continuous functions with compact support in
with respect to the supremum norm. Hence, Radon measures work on these functions as
. It is also natural to speak of the support
of a Radon measure
and it holds for any continuous function
that

An important tool for Radon measures is the Hahn-Jordan decomposition which decomposes
into a positive part
and a negative part
, i.e.
and
are non-negative and
. Finally the variation of a measure, which is

provides a norm on the space of Radon measures.
Example 1 For the measure
one readily calculates that

and hence

In this sense, the space of Radon measures provides a generalization of
.
We may sample a Radon measure
with
linear functionals and these can be encoded by
continuous functions
as

This sampling gives a bounded linear operator
. The generalization of Basis Pursuit is then given by

This was introduced and called “Support Pursuit” in the preprint Exact Reconstruction using Support Pursuit by Yohann de Castro and Frabrice Gamboa.
More on the motivation and the use of Radon measures for sparsity can be found in Inverse problems in spaces of measures by Kristian Bredies and Hanna Pikkarainen.
2. Exact reconstruction of sparse nonnegative Radon measures
Before I talk about the results we may count the degrees of freedom a sparse Radon measure has: If
with some
than
is defined by the
weights
and the
positions
. Hence, we expect that at least
linear measurements should be necessary to reconstruct
. Surprisingly, this is almost enough if we know that the measure is nonnegative! We only need one more measurement, that is
and moreover, we can take fairly simple measurements, namely the monomials:
(with the convention that
). This is shown in the following theorem by de Castro and Gamboa.
Theorem 1 Let
with
,
and let
,
be the monomials as above. Define
. Then
is the unique solution of the support pursuit problem, that is of

Proof: The following polynomial will be of importance: For a constant
define

The following properties of
will be used:
-
for
-
has degree
and hence, is a linear combination of the
,
, i.e.
.
- For
small enough it holds for
that
.
Now let
be a solution of (SP). We have to show that
. Due to property 2 we know that

Due to property 1 and non-negativity of
we conclude that

Moreover, by Lebesgue’s decomposition we can decompose
with respect to
such that

and
is singular with respect to
. We get

and we conclude that
and especially
. This shows that
is a solution to
. It remains to show uniqueness. We show the following: If there is a
with support in
such that
, then
. To see this, we build, for any
, the sets
![\displaystyle \Omega_r = [-1,1]\setminus \bigcup_{i=1}^s ]x_i-r,x_i+r[. \displaystyle \Omega_r = [-1,1]\setminus \bigcup_{i=1}^s ]x_i-r,x_i+r[.](http://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cdisplaystyle++%5COmega_r+%3D+%5B-1%2C1%5D%5Csetminus+%5Cbigcup_%7Bi%3D1%7D%5Es+%5Dx_i-r%2Cx_i%2Br%5B.+&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&s=0)
and assume that there exists
such that
(
denoting the restriction of
to
). However, it holds by property 3 of
that

and consequently

which is a contradiction. Hence,
for all
and this implies
. Since
has its support in
we conclude that
. Hence the support of
is exactly
. and since
and hence
. This can be written as a Vandermonde system

which only has the zero solution, giving
. 
3. Generalization to other measurements
The measurement by monomials may sound a bit unusual. However, de Castro and Gamboa show more. What really matters here is that the monomials for a so-called Chebyshev-System (or Tchebyscheff-system or T-system – by the way, have you ever tried to google for a T-system?). This is explained, for example in the book “Tchebycheff Systems: With Applications in Analysis and Statistics” by Karlin and Studden. A T-system on
is simply a set of
functions
such that any linear combination of these functions has at most
zeros. These systems are called after Tchebyscheff since they obey many of the helpful properties of the Tchebyscheff-polynomials.
What is helpful in our context is the following theorem of Krein:
Theorem 2 (Krein) If
is a T-system for
,
and
are in the interior of
, then there exists a linear combination
which is non-negative and vanishes exactly the the point
.
Now consider that we replace the monomials in Theorem~1 by a T-system. You recognize that Krein’s Theorem allows to construct a “generalized polynomial” which fulfills the same requirements than the polynomial
is the proof of Theorem~1 as soon as the constant function 1 lies in the span of the T-system and indeed the result of Theorem~1 is also valid in that case.
4. Exact reconstruction of
-sparse nonnegative vectors from
measurements
From the above one can deduce a reconstruction result for
-sparse vectors and I quote Theorem 2.4 from Exact Reconstruction using Support Pursuit:
Theorem 3 Let
,
,
be integers such that
and let
be a complete T-system on
(that is,
is a T-system on
for all
). Then it holds: For any distinct reals
and
defined as

Basis Pursuit recovers all nonnegative
-sparse vectors
.
5. Concluding remarks
Note that Theorem~3 gives a deterministic construction of a measurement matrix.
Also note, that nonnegativity is crucial in what we did here. This allowed (in the monomial case) to work with squares and obtain the polynomial
in the proof of Theorem~1 (which is also called “dual certificate” in this context). This raises the question how this method can be adapted to all sparse signals. One needs (in the monomial case) a polynomial which is bounded by 1 but matches the signs of the measure on its support. While this can be done (I think) for polynomials it seems difficult to obtain a generalization of Krein’s Theorem to this case…
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