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In this paper we prove the existence of H\"{o}lder continuous terminal embeddings of any desired $X \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$ into $\mathbb{R}^{m}$ with $m=\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2}\omega(S_X)^2)$, for arbitrarily small distortion $\varepsilon$, where $\omega(S_X)$ denotes the Gaussian width of the unit secants of $X$. More specifically, when $X$ is a finite set we provide terminal embeddings that are locally $\frac{1}{2}$-H\"{o}lder almost everywhere, and when $X$ is infinite with positive reach we give terminal embeddings that are locally $\frac{1}{4}$-H\"{o}lder everywhere sufficiently close to $X$ (i.e., within all tubes around $X$ of radius less than $X$'s reach). When $X$ is a compact $d$-dimensional submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^N$, an application of our main results provides terminal embeddings into $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d)$-dimensional space that are locally H\"{o}lder everywhere sufficiently close to the manifold., Comment: 1 figure, 23 pages

On the forefront of scientific computing, Deep Learning (DL), i.e., machine learning with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), has emerged a powerful new tool for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). It has been observed that DNNs are particularly well suited to weakening the effect of the curse of dimensionality, a term coined by Richard E. Bellman in the late `50s to describe challenges such as the exponential dependence of the sample complexity, i.e., the number of samples required to solve an approximation problem, on the dimension of the ambient space. However, although DNNs have been used to solve PDEs since the `90s, the literature underpinning their mathematical efficiency in terms of numerical analysis (i.e., stability, accuracy, and sample complexity), is only recently beginning to emerge. In this paper, we leverage recent advancements in function approximation using sparsity-based techniques and random sampling to develop and analyze an efficient high-dimensional PDE solver based on DL. We show, both theoretically and numerically, that it can compete with a novel stable and accurate compressive spectral collocation method. In particular, we demonstrate a new practical existence theorem, which establishes the existence of a class of trainable DNNs with suitable bounds on the network architecture and a sufficient condition on the sample complexity, with logarithmic or, at worst, linear scaling in dimension, such that the resulting networks stably and accurately approximate a diffusion-reaction PDE with high probability.

Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) is a numerical method that seeks to fit timeseries data to a linear dynamical system. In doing so, DMD decomposes dynamic data into spatially coherent modes that evolve in time according to exponential growth/decay or with a fixed frequency of oscillation. A prolific application of DMD has been to video, where one interprets the high-dimensional pixel space evolving through time as the video plays. In this work, we propose a simple and interpretable motion detection algorithm for streaming video data rooted in DMD. Our method leverages the fact that there exists a correspondence between the evolution of important video features, such as foreground motion, and the eigenvalues of the matrix which results from applying DMD to segments of video. We apply the method to a database of test videos which emulate security footage under varying realistic conditions. Effectiveness is analyzed using receiver operating characteristic curves, while we use cross-validation to optimize the threshold parameter that identifies movement.

Learning approximations to smooth target functions of many variables from finite sets of pointwise samples is an important task in scientific computing and its many applications in computational science and engineering. Despite well over half a century of research on high-dimensional approximation, this remains a challenging problem. Yet, significant advances have been made in the last decade towards efficient methods for doing this, commencing with so-called sparse polynomial approximation methods and continuing most recently with methods based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). In tandem, there have been substantial advances in the relevant approximation theory and analysis of these techniques. In this work, we survey this recent progress. We describe the contemporary motivations for this problem, which stem from parametric models and computational uncertainty quantification; the relevant function classes, namely, classes of infinite-dimensional, Banach-valued, holomorphic functions; fundamental limits of learnability from finite data for these classes; and finally, sparse polynomial and DNN methods for efficiently learning such functions from finite data. For the latter, there is currently a significant gap between the approximation theory of DNNs and the practical performance of deep learning. Aiming to narrow this gap, we develop the topic of practical existence theory, which asserts the existence of dimension-independent DNN architectures and training strategies that achieve provably near-optimal generalization errors in terms of the amount of training data.

Recent work in deep learning has shown strong empirical and theoretical evidence of an implicit low-rank bias: weight matrices in deep networks tend to be approximately low-rank and removing relatively small singular values during training or from available trained models may significantly reduce model size while maintaining or even improving model performance. However, the majority of the theoretical investigations around low-rank bias in neural networks deal with oversimplified deep linear networks. In this work, we consider general networks with nonlinear activations and the weight decay parameter, and we show the presence of an intriguing neural rank collapse phenomenon, connecting the low-rank bias of trained networks with networks' neural collapse properties: as the weight decay parameter grows, the rank of each layer in the network decreases proportionally to the within-class variability of the hidden-space embeddings of the previous layers. Our theoretical findings are supported by a range of experimental evaluations illustrating the phenomenon.

In recent years, deep learning has gained increasing popularity in the fields of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) and Reduced Order Modeling (ROM), providing domain practitioners with new powerful data-driven techniques such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), Neural Operators, Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets) and Deep-Learning based ROMs (DL-ROMs). In this context, deep autoencoders based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven extremely effective, outperforming established techniques, such as the reduced basis method, when dealing with complex nonlinear problems. However, despite the empirical success of CNN-based autoencoders, there are only a few theoretical results supporting these architectures, usually stated in the form of universal approximation theorems. In particular, although the existing literature provides users with guidelines for designing convolutional autoencoders, the subsequent challenge of learning the latent features has been barely investigated. Furthermore, many practical questions remain unanswered, e.g., the number of snapshots needed for convergence or the neural network training strategy. In this work, using recent techniques from sparse high-dimensional function approximation, we fill some of these gaps by providing a new practical existence theorem for CNN-based autoencoders when the parameter-to-solution map is holomorphic. This regularity assumption arises in many relevant classes of parametric PDEs, such as the parametric diffusion equation, for which we discuss an explicit application of our general theory.

We study generative compressed sensing when the measurement matrix is randomly subsampled from a unitary matrix (with the DFT as an important special case). It was recently shown that $\textit{O}(kdn\| \boldsymbol{\alpha}\|_{\infty}^{2})$ uniformly random Fourier measurements are sufficient to recover signals in the range of a neural network $G:\mathbb{R}^k \to \mathbb{R}^n$ of depth $d$, where each component of the so-called local coherence vector $\boldsymbol{\alpha}$ quantifies the alignment of a corresponding Fourier vector with the range of $G$. We construct a model-adapted sampling strategy with an improved sample complexity of $\textit{O}(kd\| \boldsymbol{\alpha}\|_{2}^{2})$ measurements. This is enabled by: (1) new theoretical recovery guarantees that we develop for nonuniformly random sampling distributions and then (2) optimizing the sampling distribution to minimize the number of measurements needed for these guarantees. This development offers a sample complexity applicable to natural signal classes, which are often almost maximally coherent with low Fourier frequencies. Finally, we consider a surrogate sampling scheme, and validate its performance in recovery experiments using the CelebA dataset., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to the NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Deep Learning and Inverse Problems. This revision features additional attribution of work, aknowledgmenents, and a correction in definition 1.1

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for data-driven learning on various graph domains. They are usually based on a message-passing mechanism and have gained increasing popularity for their intuitive formulation, which is closely linked to the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test for graph isomorphism to which they have been proven equivalent in terms of expressive power. In this work, we establish new generalization properties and fundamental limits of GNNs in the context of learning so-called identity effects, i.e., the task of determining whether an object is composed of two identical components or not. Our study is motivated by the need to understand the capabilities of GNNs when performing simple cognitive tasks, with potential applications in computational linguistics and chemistry. We analyze two case studies: (i) two-letters words, for which we show that GNNs trained via stochastic gradient descent are unable to generalize to unseen letters when utilizing orthogonal encodings like one-hot representations; (ii) dicyclic graphs, i.e., graphs composed of two cycles, for which we present positive existence results leveraging the connection between GNNs and the WL test. Our theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive numerical study., Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures

This paper studies well-posedness and parameter sensitivity of the Square Root LASSO (SR-LASSO), an optimization model for recovering sparse solutions to linear inverse problems in finite dimension. An advantage of the SR-LASSO (e.g., over the standard LASSO) is that the optimal tuning of the regularization parameter is robust with respect to measurement noise. This paper provides three point-based regularity conditions at a solution of the SR-LASSO: the weak, intermediate, and strong assumptions. It is shown that the weak assumption implies uniqueness of the solution in question. The intermediate assumption yields a directionally differentiable and locally Lipschitz solution map (with explicit Lipschitz bounds), whereas the strong assumption gives continuous differentiability of said map around the point in question. Our analysis leads to new theoretical insights on the comparison between SR-LASSO and LASSO from the viewpoint of tuning parameter sensitivity: noise-robust optimal parameter choice for SR-LASSO comes at the "price" of elevated tuning parameter sensitivity. Numerical results support and showcase the theoretical findings.

We propose a class of greedy algorithms for weighted sparse recovery by considering new loss function-based generalizations of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP). Given a (regularized) loss function, the proposed algorithms alternate the iterative construction of the signal support via greedy index selection and a signal update based on solving a local data-fitting problem restricted to the current support. We show that greedy selection rules associated with popular weighted sparsity-promoting loss functions admit explicitly computable and simple formulas. Specifically, we consider $ \ell^0 $- and $ \ell^1 $-based versions of the weighted LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator), the Square-Root LASSO (SR-LASSO) and the Least Absolute Deviations LASSO (LAD-LASSO). Through numerical experiments on Gaussian compressive sensing and high-dimensional function approximation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and empirically show that they inherit desirable characteristics from the corresponding loss functions, such as SR-LASSO's noise-blind optimal parameter tuning and LAD-LASSO's fault tolerance. In doing so, our study sheds new light on the connection between greedy sparse recovery and convex relaxation.

The past decade has seen increasing interest in applying Deep Learning (DL) to Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). Driven by impressive results in applications such as computer vision, Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), genetics, simulations and image processing, DL is increasingly supplanting classical algorithms, and seems poised to revolutionize scientific computing. However, DL is not yet well-understood from the standpoint of numerical analysis. Little is known about the efficiency and reliability of DL from the perspectives of stability, robustness, accuracy, and sample complexity. In particular, approximating solutions to parametric PDEs is an objective of UQ for CSE. Training data for such problems is often scarce and corrupted by errors. Moreover, the target function is a possibly infinite-dimensional smooth function taking values in the PDE solution space, generally an infinite-dimensional Banach space. This paper provides arguments for Deep Neural Network (DNN) approximation of such functions, with both known and unknown parametric dependence, that overcome the curse of dimensionality. We establish practical existence theorems that describe classes of DNNs with dimension-independent architecture size and training procedures based on minimizing the (regularized) $\ell^2$-loss which achieve near-optimal algebraic rates of convergence. These results involve key extensions of compressed sensing for Banach-valued recovery and polynomial emulation with DNNs. When approximating solutions of parametric PDEs, our results account for all sources of error, i.e., sampling, optimization, approximation and physical discretization, and allow for training high-fidelity DNN approximations from coarse-grained sample data. Our theoretical results fall into the category of non-intrusive methods, providing a theoretical alternative to classical methods for high-dimensional approximation., Comment: 55 pages

This paper concerns the approximation of smooth, high-dimensional functions from limited samples using polynomials. This task lies at the heart of many applications in computational science and engineering - notably, some of those arising from parametric modelling and computational uncertainty quantification. It is common to use Monte Carlo sampling in such applications, so as not to succumb to the curse of dimensionality. However, it is well known that such a strategy is theoretically suboptimal. Specifically, there are many polynomial spaces of dimension $n$ for which the sample complexity scales log-quadratically, i.e., like $c \cdot n^2 \cdot \log(n)$ as $n \rightarrow \infty$. This well-documented phenomenon has led to a concerted effort over the last decade to design improved, and moreover, near-optimal strategies, whose sample complexities scale log-linearly, or even linearly in $n$. In this work we demonstrate that Monte Carlo is actually a perfectly good strategy in high dimensions, despite its apparent suboptimality. We first document this phenomenon empirically via a systematic set of numerical experiments. Next, we present a theoretical analysis that rigorously justifies this fact in the case of holomorphic functions of infinitely-many variables. We show that there is a least-squares approximation based on $m$ Monte Carlo samples whose error decays algebraically fast in $m/\log(m)$, with a rate that is the same as that of the best $n$-term polynomial approximation. This result is non-constructive, since it assumes knowledge of a suitable polynomial subspace in which to perform the approximation. We next present a compressed sensing-based scheme that achieves the same rate, except for a larger polylogarithmic factor. This scheme is practical, and numerically it performs as well as or better than well-known adaptive least-squares schemes.

In Bora et al. (2017), a mathematical framework was developed for compressed sensing guarantees in the setting where the measurement matrix is Gaussian and the signal structure is the range of a generative neural network (GNN). The problem of compressed sensing with GNNs has since been extensively analyzed when the measurement matrix and/or network weights follow a subgaussian distribution. We move beyond the subgaussian assumption, to measurement matrices that are derived by sampling uniformly at random rows of a unitary matrix (including subsampled Fourier measurements as a special case). Specifically, we prove the first known restricted isometry guarantee for generative compressed sensing with subsampled isometries and provide recovery bounds, addressing an open problem of Scarlett et al. (2022, p. 10). Recovery efficacy is characterized by the coherence, a new parameter, which measures the interplay between the range of the network and the measurement matrix. Our approach relies on subspace counting arguments and ideas central to high-dimensional probability. Furthermore, we propose a regularization strategy for training GNNs to have favourable coherence with the measurement operator. We provide compelling numerical simulations that support this regularized training strategy: our strategy yields low coherence networks that require fewer measurements for signal recovery. This, together with our theoretical results, supports coherence as a natural quantity for characterizing generative compressed sensing with subsampled isometries.

High-dimensional Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are a popular mathematical modelling tool, with applications ranging from finance to computational chemistry. However, standard numerical techniques for solving these PDEs are typically affected by the curse of dimensionality. In this work, we tackle this challenge while focusing on stationary diffusion equations defined over a high-dimensional domain with periodic boundary conditions. Inspired by recent progress in sparse function approximation in high dimensions, we propose a new method called compressive Fourier collocation. Combining ideas from compressive sensing and spectral collocation, our method replaces the use of structured collocation grids with Monte Carlo sampling and employs sparse recovery techniques, such as orthogonal matching pursuit and $\ell^1$ minimization, to approximate the Fourier coefficients of the PDE solution. We conduct a rigorous theoretical analysis showing that the approximation error of the proposed method is comparable with the best $s$-term approximation (with respect to the Fourier basis) to the solution. Using the recently introduced framework of random sampling in bounded Riesz systems, our analysis shows that the compressive Fourier collocation method mitigates the curse of dimensionality with respect to the number of collocation points under sufficient conditions on the regularity of the diffusion coefficient. We also present numerical experiments that illustrate the accuracy and stability of the method for the approximation of sparse and compressible solutions., Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures

This paper provides a variational analysis of the unconstrained formulation of the LASSO problem, ubiquitous in statistical learning, signal processing, and inverse problems. In particular, we establish smoothness results for the optimal value as well as Lipschitz properties of the optimal solution as functions of the right-hand side (or measurement vector) and the regularization parameter. Moreover, we show how to apply the proposed variational analysis to study the sensitivity of the optimal solution to the tuning parameter in the context of compressed sensing with subgaussian measurements. Our theoretical findings are validated by numerical experiments.

Sparse polynomial approximation has become indispensable for approximating smooth, high- or infinite-dimensional functions from limited samples. This is a key task in computational science and engineering, e.g., surrogate modelling in uncertainty quantification where the function is the solution map of a parametric or stochastic differential equation (DE). Yet, sparse polynomial approximation lacks a complete theory. On the one hand, there is a well-developed theory of best $s$-term polynomial approximation, which asserts exponential or algebraic rates of convergence for holomorphic functions. On the other, there are increasingly mature methods such as (weighted) $\ell^1$-minimization for computing such approximations. While the sample complexity of these methods has been analyzed with compressed sensing, whether they achieve best $s$-term approximation rates is not fully understood. Furthermore, these methods are not algorithms per se, as they involve exact minimizers of nonlinear optimization problems. This paper closes these gaps. Specifically, we consider the following question: are there robust, efficient algorithms for computing approximations to finite- or infinite-dimensional, holomorphic and Hilbert-valued functions from limited samples that achieve best $s$-term rates? We answer this affirmatively by introducing algorithms and theoretical guarantees that assert exponential or algebraic rates of convergence, along with robustness to sampling, algorithmic, and physical discretization errors. We tackle both scalar- and Hilbert-valued functions, this being key to parametric or stochastic DEs. Our results involve significant developments of existing techniques, including a novel restarted primal-dual iteration for solving weighted $\ell^1$-minimization problems in Hilbert spaces. Our theory is supplemented by numerical experiments demonstrating the efficacy of these algorithms.

Motivated by the question of optimal functional approximation via compressed sensing, we propose generalizations of the Iterative Hard Thresholding and the Compressive Sampling Matching Pursuit algorithms able to promote sparse in levels signals. We show, by means of numerical experiments, that the proposed algorithms are successfully able to outperform their unstructured variants when the signal exhibits the sparsity structure of interest. Moreover, in the context of piecewise smooth function approximation, we numerically demonstrate that the structure promoting decoders outperform their unstructured variants and the basis pursuit program when the encoder is structure agnostic.

Often in language and other areas of cognition, whether two components of an object are identical or not determines if it is well formed. We call such constraints identity effects. When developing a system to learn well-formedness from examples, it is easy enough to build in an identify effect. But can identity effects be learned from the data without explicit guidance? We provide a framework in which we can rigorously prove that algorithms satisfying simple criteria cannot make the correct inference. We then show that a broad class of learning algorithms including deep feedforward neural networks trained via gradient-based algorithms (such as stochastic gradient descent or the Adam method) satisfy our criteria, dependent on the encoding of inputs. In some broader circumstances we are able to provide adversarial examples that the network necessarily classifies incorrectly. Finally, we demonstrate our theory with computational experiments in which we explore the effect of different input encodings on the ability of algorithms to generalize to novel inputs. This allows us to show similar effects to those predicted by theory for more realistic methods that violate some of the conditions of our theoretical results., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2005.04330

Accurate approximation of scalar-valued functions from sample points is a key task in computational science. Recently, machine learning with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has emerged as a promising tool for scientific computing, with impressive results achieved on problems where the dimension of the data or problem domain is large. This work broadens this perspective, focusing on approximating functions that are Hilbert-valued, i.e. take values in a separable, but typically infinite-dimensional, Hilbert space. This arises in science and engineering problems, in particular those involving solution of parametric Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Such problems are challenging: 1) pointwise samples are expensive to acquire, 2) the function domain is high dimensional, and 3) the range lies in a Hilbert space. Our contributions are twofold. First, we present a novel result on DNN training for holomorphic functions with so-called hidden anisotropy. This result introduces a DNN training procedure and full theoretical analysis with explicit guarantees on error and sample complexity. The error bound is explicit in three key errors occurring in the approximation procedure: the best approximation, measurement, and physical discretization errors. Our result shows that there exists a procedure (albeit non-standard) for learning Hilbert-valued functions via DNNs that performs as well as, but no better than current best-in-class schemes. It gives a benchmark lower bound for how well DNNs can perform on such problems. Second, we examine whether better performance can be achieved in practice through different types of architectures and training. We provide preliminary numerical results illustrating practical performance of DNNs on parametric PDEs. We consider different parameters, modifying the DNN architecture to achieve better and competitive results, comparing these to current best-in-class schemes.

The sparsity in levels model recently inspired a new generation of effective acquisition and reconstruction modalities for compressive imaging. Moreover, it naturally arises in various areas of signal processing such as parallel acquisition, radar, and the sparse corruptions problem. Reconstruction strategies for sparse in levels signals usually rely on a suitable convex optimization program. Notably, although iterative and greedy algorithms can outperform convex optimization in terms of computational efficiency and have been studied extensively in the case of standard sparsity, little is known about their generalizations to the sparse in levels setting. In this paper, we bridge this gap by showing new stable and robust uniform recovery guarantees for sparse in level variants of the iterative hard thresholding and the CoSaMP algorithms. Our theoretical analysis generalizes recovery guarantees currently available in the case of standard sparsity and favorably compare to sparse in levels guarantees for weighted $\ell^1$ minimization. In addition, we also propose and numerically test an extension of the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm for sparse in levels signals.

We study sparse recovery with structured random measurement matrices having independent, identically distributed, and uniformly bounded rows and with a nontrivial covariance structure. This class of matrices arises from random sampling of bounded Riesz systems and generalizes random partial Fourier matrices. Our main result improves the currently available results for the null space and restricted isometry properties of such random matrices. The main novelty of our analysis is a new upper bound for the expectation of the supremum of a Bernoulli process associated with a restricted isometry constant. We apply our result to prove new performance guarantees for the CORSING method, a recently introduced numerical approximation technique for partial differential equations (PDEs) based on compressive sensing.

Often in language and other areas of cognition, whether two components of an object are identical or not determine whether it is well formed. We call such constraints identity effects. When developing a system to learn well-formedness from examples, it is easy enough to build in an identify effect. But can identity effects be learned from the data without explicit guidance? We provide a simple framework in which we can rigorously prove that algorithms satisfying simple criteria cannot make the correct inference. We then show that a broad class of algorithms including deep neural networks with standard architecture and training with backpropagation satisfy our criteria, dependent on the encoding of inputs. Finally, we demonstrate our theory with computational experiments in which we explore the effect of different input encodings on the ability of algorithms to generalize to novel inputs.

This work is motivated by the difficulty in assembling the Galerkin matrix when solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) with Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) using B-splines of moderate-to-high polynomial degree. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel methodology named CossIGA (COmpreSSive IsoGeometric Analysis), which combines the IGA principle with CORSING, a recently introduced sparse recovery approach for PDEs based on compressive sensing. CossIGA assembles only a small portion of a suitable IGA Petrov-Galerkin discretization and is effective whenever the PDE solution is sufficiently sparse or compressible, i.e., when most of its coefficients are zero or negligible. The sparsity of the solution is promoted by employing a multilevel dictionary of B-splines as opposed to a basis. Thanks to sparsity and the fact that only a fraction of the full discretization matrix is assembled, the proposed technique has the potential to lead to significant computational savings. We show the effectiveness of CossIGA for the solution of the 2D and 3D Poisson equation over nontrivial geometries by means of an extensive numerical investigation.

A signature result in compressed sensing is that Gaussian random sampling achieves stable and robust recovery of sparse vectors under optimal conditions on the number of measurements. However, in the context of image reconstruction, it has been extensively documented that sampling strategies based on Fourier measurements outperform this purportedly optimal approach. Motivated by this seeming paradox, we investigate the problem of optimal sampling for compressed sensing. Rigorously combining the theories of wavelet approximation and infinite-dimensional compressed sensing, our analysis leads to new error bounds in terms of the total number of measurements $m$ for the approximation of piecewise $\alpha$-H\"{o}lder functions. Our theoretical findings suggest that Fourier sampling outperforms random Gaussian sampling when the H\"older exponent $\alpha$ is large enough. Moreover, we establish a provably optimal sampling strategy. This work is an important first step towards the resolution of the claimed paradox, and provides a clear theoretical justification for the practical success of compressed sensing techniques in imaging problems.

We present and analyze a novel wavelet-Fourier technique for the numerical treatment of multidimensional advection-diffusion-reaction equations based on the CORSING (COmpRessed SolvING) paradigm. Combining the Petrov-Galerkin technique with the compressed sensing approach, the proposed method is able to approximate the largest coefficients of the solution with respect to a biorthogonal wavelet basis. Namely, we assemble a compressed discretization based on randomized subsampling of the Fourier test space and we employ sparse recovery techniques to approximate the solution to the PDE. In this paper, we provide the first rigorous recovery error bounds and effective recipes for the implementation of the CORSING technique in the multi-dimensional setting. Our theoretical analysis relies on new estimates for the local a-coherence, which measures interferences between wavelet and Fourier basis functions with respect to the metric induced by the PDE operator. The stability and robustness of the proposed scheme is shown by numerical illustrations in the one-, two-, and three-dimensional case.

We show the potential of greedy recovery strategies for the sparse approximation of multivariate functions from a small dataset of pointwise evaluations by considering an extension of the orthogonal matching pursuit to the setting of weighted sparsity. The proposed recovery strategy is based on a formal derivation of the greedy index selection rule. Numerical experiments show that the proposed weighted orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm is able to reach accuracy levels similar to those of weighted $\ell^1$ minimization programs while considerably improving the computational efficiency for small values of the sparsity level.

We propose a compressive spectral collocation method for the numerical approximation of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). The approach is based on a spectral Sturm-Liouville approximation of the solution and on the collocation of the PDE in strong form at randomized points, by taking advantage of the compressive sensing principle. The proposed approach makes use of a number of collocation points substantially less than the number of basis functions when the solution to recover is sparse or compressible. Focusing on the case of the diffusion equation, we prove that, under suitable assumptions on the diffusion coefficient, the matrix associated with the compressive spectral collocation approach satisfies the restricted isometry property of compressive sensing with high probability. Moreover, we demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to reduce the computational cost associated with the corresponding full spectral collocation approach while preserving good accuracy through numerical illustrations.

We present improved sampling complexity bounds for stable and robust sparse recovery in compressed sensing. Our unified analysis based on l1 minimization encompasses the case where (i) the measurements are block-structured samples in order to reflect the structured acquisition that is often encountered in applications; (ii) the signal has an arbitrary structured sparsity, by results depending on its support S. Within this framework and under a random sign assumption, the number of measurements needed by l1 minimization can be shown to be of the same order than the one required by an oracle least-squares estimator. Moreover, these bounds can be minimized by adapting the variable density sampling to a given prior on the signal support and to the coherence of the measurements. We illustrate both numerically and analytically that our results can be successfully applied to recover Haar wavelet coefficients that are sparse in levels from random Fourier measurements in dimension one and two, which can be of particular interest in imaging problems. Finally, a preliminary numerical investigation shows the potential of this theory for devising adaptive sampling strategies in sparse polynomial approximation.

We consider sparsity-based techniques for the approximation of high-dimensional functions from random pointwise evaluations. To date, almost all the works published in this field contain some a priori assumptions about the error corrupting the samples that are hard to verify in practice. In this paper, we instead focus on the scenario where the error is unknown. We study the performance of four sparsity-promoting optimization problems: weighted quadratically-constrained basis pursuit, weighted LASSO, weighted square-root LASSO, and weighted LAD-LASSO. From the theoretical perspective, we prove uniform recovery guarantees for these decoders, deriving recipes for the optimal choice of the respective tuning parameters. On the numerical side, we compare them in the pure function approximation case and in applications to uncertainty quantification of ODEs and PDEs with random inputs. Our main conclusion is that the lesser-known square-root LASSO is better suited for high-dimensional approximation than the other procedures in the case of bounded noise, since it avoids (both theoretically and numerically) the need for parameter tuning.