Adaptation in a class of linear inverse problems

Abstract: We consider the linear inverse problem of estimating an unknown signal $f$ from noisy measurements on $Kf$ where the linear operator $K$ admits a wavelet-vaguelette decomposition (WVD). We formulate the problem in the Gaussian sequence model and propose estimation based on complexity penalized regression on a level-by-level basis. We adopt squared error loss and show that the estimator achieves exact rate-adaptive optimality as $f$ varies over a wide range of Besov function classes.