Robustness to unknown error in sparse regularization

Abstract: Quadratically-constrained basis pursuit has become a popular device in sparse regularization; in particular, in the context of compressed sensing. However, the majority of theoretical error estimates for this regularizer assume an a priori bound on the noise level, which is usually lacking in practice. In this paper, we develop stability and robustness estimates which remove this assumption. First, we introduce an abstract framework and show that robust instance optimality of any decoder in the noise-aware setting implies stability and robustness in the noise-blind setting. This is based on certain sup-inf constants referred to as quotients, strictly related to the quotient property of compressed sensing. We then apply this theory to prove the robustness of quadratically-constrained basis pursuit under unknown error in the cases of random Gaussian matrices and of random matrices with heavy-tailed rows, such as random sampling matrices from bounded orthonormal systems. We illustrate our results in several cases of practical importance, including subsampled Fourier measurements and recovery of sparse polynomial expansions.