Sparse Approximation via Polynomial Equations

Abstract: We consider the problem of finding sparse solutions of an underdetermined linear system $Ax=b$. In contrast to conventional approaches based on greedy algorithms or convex relaxation, we reformulate sparse approximation as a structured system of polynomial equations and connect with the literature on tensor methods. We develop an eigenvalue decomposition based method that formally guarantees recovery of all sparse solutions if there is more than one. We also develop two optimization-based methods achieving favorable computational complexity. The new methods allow explicit control of the target sparsity. Numerical experiments illustrate the performance and compare to basis pursuit (denoising) and orthogonal matching pursuit.