Steffen Peter

Massimo Fornasier, Steffen Peter, Holger Rauhut et al.

Iteratively Re-weighted Least Squares (IRLS) is a method for solving minimization problems involving non-quadratic cost functions, perhaps non-convex and non-smooth, which however can be described as the infimum over a family of quadratic functions. This transformation suggests an algorithmic scheme that solves a sequence of quadratic problems to be tackled efficiently by tools of numerical linear algebra. Its general scope and its usually simple implementation, transforming the initial non-convex and non-smooth minimization problem into a more familiar and easily solvable quadratic optimization problem, make it a versatile algorithm. However, despite its simplicity, versatility, and elegant analysis, the complexity of IRLS strongly depends on the way the solution of the successive quadratic optimizations is addressed. For the important special case of $\textit{compressed sensing}$ and sparse recovery problems in signal processing, we investigate theoretically and numerically how accurately one needs to solve the quadratic problems by means of the $\textit{conjugate gradient}$ (CG) method in each iteration in order to guarantee convergence. The use of the CG method may significantly speed-up the numerical solution of the quadratic subproblems, in particular, when fast matrix-vector multiplication (exploiting for instance the FFT) is available for the matrix involved. In addition, we study convergence rates. Our modified IRLS method outperforms state of the art first order methods such as Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) or Fast Iterative Soft-Thresholding Algorithm (FISTA) in many situations, especially in large dimensions. Moreover, IRLS is often able to recover sparse vectors from fewer measurements than required for IHT and FISTA.

Marco Artina, Massimo Fornasier, Steffen Peter

The practice of compressed sensing suffers importantly in terms of the efficiency/accuracy trade-off when acquiring noisy signals prior to measurement. It is rather common to find results treating the noise affecting the measurements, avoiding in this way to face the so-called $\textit{noise-folding}$ phenomenon, related to the noise in the signal, eventually amplified by the measurement procedure. In this paper, we present two new decoding procedures, combining $\ell_1$-minimization followed by either a regularized selective least $p$-powers or an iterative hard thresholding, which not only are able to reduce this component of the original noise, but also have enhanced properties in terms of support identification with respect to the sole $\ell_1$-minimization or iteratively re-weighted $\ell_1$-minimization. We prove such features, providing relatively simple and precise theoretical guarantees. We additionally confirm and support the theoretical results by extensive numerical simulations, which give a statistics of the robustness of the new decoding procedures with respect to more classical $\ell_1$-minimization and iteratively re-weighted $\ell_1$-minimization.