Analysis of Democratic Voting Principles used in Distributed Greedy Algorithms

Abstract: A key aspect for any greedy pursuit algorithm used in compressed sensing is a good support-set detection method. For distributed compressed sensing, we consider a setup where many sensors measure sparse signals that are correlated via the existence of a signals' intersection support-set. This intersection support-set is called the joint support-set. Estimation of the joint support-set has a high impact on the performance of a distributed greedy pursuit algorithm. This estimation can be achieved by exchanging local support-set estimates followed by a (consensus) voting method. In this paper we endeavor for a probabilistic analysis of two democratic voting principle that we call majority and consensus voting. In our analysis, we first model the input/output relation of a greedy algorithm (executed locally in a sensor) by a single parameter known as probability of miss. Based on this model, we analyze the voting principles and prove that the democratic voting principle has a merit to detect the joint support-set.