Linear inverse problems with nonnegativity constraints: singularity of optimisers (Q6066518)

In the paper under review, the authors study linear inverse problems of the type \(Ax = y\), where \(A\) is a linear operator, and \(y\) lies in a suitable linear space. In many applications, for example medical imaging and Positron Emission Tomography, \(x\) is a nonnegative number. In this paper, the authors focus on the case where the noise model leads to maximum likelihood estimation through general divergences, which cover a wide range of common noise statistics such as Gaussian and Poisson. Thinking of the unknown \(x\) as a function (say \(f\)) in some functional space \(X\) of functions over a compact set \(K\in \mathbb R^p\) and where the operator \(A\) is a linear mapping from \(X\) to \(\mathbb R^m\), leads to the optimisation problem \(\min_{f\geq 0}D(y,A\mu)\). This non-negativity constraint has been shown to cause sparsity in various contexts in optimal control and optimization. The authors prove several key results and provide several numerical examples. The paper is well written with a good set of references.