Encoder blind combinatorial compressed sensing
This addresses a fundamental limitation in compressed sensing for applications like linear sketching and coding theory, though it is incremental as it builds on existing matrix factorization approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of recovering sparse codes and the encoder matrix from linear measurements without prior knowledge of the encoder, proposing a computationally efficient algorithm called Decoder-Expander Based Factorisation that achieves optimal measurement rates and near-optimal sample complexity with high probability.
In its most elementary form, compressed sensing studies the design of decoding algorithms to recover a sufficiently sparse vector or code from a lower dimensional linear measurement vector. Typically it is assumed that the decoder has access to the encoder matrix, which in the combinatorial case is sparse and binary. In this paper we consider the problem of designing a decoder to recover a set of sparse codes from their linear measurements alone, that is without access to encoder matrix. To this end we study the matrix factorisation task of recovering both the encoder and sparse coding matrices from the associated linear measurement matrix. The contribution of this paper is a computationally efficient decoding algorithm, Decoder-Expander Based Factorisation, with strong performance guarantees. In particular, under mild assumptions on the sparse coding matrix and by deploying a novel random encoder matrix, we prove that Decoder-Expander Based Factorisation recovers both the encoder and sparse coding matrix at the optimal measurement rate with high probability and from a near optimal number of measurement vectors. In addition, our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and computational efficiency of our algorithm in practice. Beyond compressed sensing our results may be of interest for researchers working in areas such as linear sketching, coding theory and matrix compression.