Universal, sample-optimal algorithms for recovery of anisotropic functions from i.i.d. samples
This work addresses a key challenge in approximation theory for researchers and practitioners dealing with high-dimensional data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing compressed sensing and sparse recovery techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of recovering high-dimensional functions with anisotropic smoothness from i.i.d. samples by developing a universal algorithm that achieves near-optimal convergence rates across various smoothness classes without prior knowledge of anisotropy, and it demonstrates that nonlinear algorithms are necessary to avoid a curse of dimensionality.
A key problem in approximation theory is the recovery of high-dimensional functions from samples. In many cases, the functions of interest exhibit anisotropic smoothness, and, in many practical settings, the nature of this anisotropy may be unknown a priori. Therefore, an important question involves the development of universal algorithms, namely, algorithms that simultaneously achieve optimal or near-optimal rates of convergence across a range of different anisotropic smoothness classes. In this work, we consider universal approximation of periodic functions that belong to anisotropic Sobolev spaces and anisotropic dominating mixed smoothness Sobolev spaces. Our first result is the construction of a universal algorithm. This recasts function recovery as a sparse recovery problem for Fourier coefficients and then exploits compressed sensing to yield the desired approximation rates. Note that this algorithm is nonadaptive, as it does not seek to learn the anisotropic smoothness of the target function. We then demonstrate optimality of this algorithm up to a dimension-independent polylogarithmic factor. We do this by presenting a lower bound for the adaptive $m$-width for the unit balls of such function classes. Finally, we demonstrate the necessity of nonlinear algorithms. We show that universal linear algorithms can achieve rates that are at best suboptimal by a dimension-dependent polylogarithmic factor. In other words, they suffer from a curse of dimensionality in the rate -- a phenomenon which justifies the necessity of nonlinear algorithms for universal recovery.