Enhancing sparsity by reweighted _1 minimization

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Publication:734955



Abstract: It is now well understood that (1) it is possible to reconstruct sparse signals exactly from what appear to be highly incomplete sets of linear measurements and (2) that this can be done by constrained L1 minimization. In this paper, we study a novel method for sparse signal recovery that in many situations outperforms L1 minimization in the sense that substantially fewer measurements are needed for exact recovery. The algorithm consists of solving a sequence of weighted L1-minimization problems where the weights used for the next iteration are computed from the value of the current solution. We present a series of experiments demonstrating the remarkable performance and broad applicability of this algorithm in the areas of sparse signal recovery, statistical estimation, error correction and image processing. Interestingly, superior gains are also achieved when our method is applied to recover signals with assumed near-sparsity in overcomplete representations--not by reweighting the L1 norm of the coefficient sequence as is common, but by reweighting the L1 norm of the transformed object. An immediate consequence is the possibility of highly efficient data acquisition protocols by improving on a technique known as compressed sensing.


In this nice paper, the authors study a new method for sparse signal recovery that outperforms (unweighted) \(\ell_1\)minimization in the sense that substantially fewer measurements are needed for exact recovery. Let \(\Phi\) be a real \(m\times n\) matrix with \(m<n\). The authors would want to recover a (sparse) signal \(x_0 \in {\mathbb R}^n\) from given data \(y = \Phi x_0\) by solving a weighted \(\ell_1\) minimization problem \[ \min_{x\in {\mathbb R}^n} \sum_{i=1}^n w_i\,|x_i| \;\mathrm{subject to}\; y=\Phi x\,, \] where \(w_i\) are positive weights and \(x = (x_i)_{i=1}^n\in {\mathbb R}^n\). The authors propose a simple iterative algorithm that alternates between estimating \(x_0\) and redefining the weights. The weights are stepwise computed from the current solution. The number of iterations is typically very low. This iterative algorithm falls in the general class of majorization-minimization algorithms. Numerous experiments demonstrate the performance and applicability of this algorithm in sparse signal recovery, compressive sensing, statistical estimation, error correction, and magnetic resonance imaging. This paper closes with discussions of related work and possible future directions.



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