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Model selection is an indispensable part of data analysis dealing very frequently with fitting and prediction purposes. In this paper, we tackle the problem of model selection in a general linear regression where the parameter matrix possesses a block-sparse structure, i.e., the non-zero entries occur in clusters or blocks and the number of such non-zero blocks is very small compared to the parameter dimension. Furthermore, a high-dimensional setting is considered where the parameter dimension is quite large compared to the number of available measurements. To perform model selection in this setting, we present an information criterion that is a generalization of the Extended Bayesian Information Criterion-Robust (EBIC-R) and it takes into account both the block structure and the high-dimensionality scenario. The analytical steps for deriving the EBIC-R for this setting are provided. Simulation results show that the proposed method performs considerably better than the existing state-of-the-art methods and achieves empirical consistency at large sample sizes and/or at high-SNR., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

Model selection in linear regression models is a major challenge when dealing with high-dimensional data where the number of available measurements (sample size) is much smaller than the dimension of the parameter space. Traditional methods for model selection such as Akaike information criterion, Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and minimum description length are heavily prone to overfitting in the high-dimensional setting. In this regard, extended BIC (EBIC), which is an extended version of the original BIC and extended Fisher information criterion (EFIC), which is a combination of EBIC and Fisher information criterion, are consistent estimators of the true model as the number of measurements grows very large. However, EBIC is not consistent in high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) scenarios where the sample size is fixed and EFIC is not invariant to data scaling resulting in unstable behaviour. In this paper, we propose a new form of the EBIC criterion called EBIC-Robust, which is invariant to data scaling and consistent in both large sample size and high-SNR scenarios. Analytical proofs are presented to guarantee its consistency. Simulation results indicate that the performance of EBIC-Robust is quite superior to that of both EBIC and EFIC., Comment: 13 pages

Graphs are naturally sparse objects that are used to study many problems involving networks, for example, distributed learning and graph signal processing. In some cases, the graph is not given, but must be learned from the problem and available data. Often it is desirable to learn sparse graphs. However, making a graph highly sparse can split the graph into several disconnected components, leading to several separate networks. The main difficulty is that connectedness is often treated as a combinatorial property, making it hard to enforce in e.g. convex optimization problems. In this article, we show how connectedness of undirected graphs can be formulated as an analytical property and can be enforced as a convex constraint. We especially show how the constraint relates to the distributed consensus problem and graph Laplacian learning. Using simulated and real data, we perform experiments to learn sparse and connected graphs from data., Comment: 5 pages, presented at the European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) 2017

We show that the recently proposed (enhanced) PUMA estimator for array processing minimizes the same criterion function as the well-established MODE estimator. (PUMA = principal-singular-vector utilization for modal analysis, MODE = method of direction estimation.)

In this paper, based on a successively accuracy-increasing approximation of the $\ell_0$ norm, we propose a new algorithm for recovery of sparse vectors from underdetermined measurements. The approximations are realized with a certain class of concave functions that aggressively induce sparsity and their closeness to the $\ell_0$ norm can be controlled. We prove that the series of the approximations asymptotically coincides with the $\ell_1$ and $\ell_0$ norms when the approximation accuracy changes from the worst fitting to the best fitting. When measurements are noise-free, an optimization scheme is proposed which leads to a number of weighted $\ell_1$ minimization programs, whereas, in the presence of noise, we propose two iterative thresholding methods that are computationally appealing. A convergence guarantee for the iterative thresholding method is provided, and, for a particular function in the class of the approximating functions, we derive the closed-form thresholding operator. We further present some theoretical analyses via the restricted isometry, null space, and spherical section properties. Our extensive numerical simulations indicate that the proposed algorithm closely follows the performance of the oracle estimator for a range of sparsity levels wider than those of the state-of-the-art algorithms., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing

Suppose that a solution $\widetilde{\mathbf{x}}$ to an underdetermined linear system $\mathbf{b} = \mathbf{A} \mathbf{x}$ is given. $\widetilde{\mathbf{x}}$ is approximately sparse meaning that it has a few large components compared to other small entries. However, the total number of nonzero components of $\widetilde{\mathbf{x}}$ is large enough to violate any condition for the uniqueness of the sparsest solution. On the other hand, if only the dominant components are considered, then it will satisfy the uniqueness conditions. One intuitively expects that $\widetilde{\mathbf{x}}$ should not be far from the true sparse solution $\mathbf{x}_0$. We show that this intuition is the case by providing an upper bound on $\| \widetilde{\mathbf{x}} - \mathbf{x}_0\|$ which is a function of the magnitudes of small components of $\widetilde{\mathbf{x}}$ but independent from $\mathbf{x}_0$. This result is extended to the case that $\mathbf{b}$ is perturbed by noise. Additionally, we generalize the upper bounds to the low-rank matrix recovery problem., Comment: Submitted to Elsevier Signal Processing

We develop latent variable models for Bayesian learning based low-rank matrix completion and reconstruction from linear measurements. For under-determined systems, the developed methods are shown to reconstruct low-rank matrices when neither the rank nor the noise power is known a-priori. We derive relations between the latent variable models and several low-rank promoting penalty functions. The relations justify the use of Kronecker structured covariance matrices in a Gaussian based prior. In the methods, we use evidence approximation and expectation-maximization to learn the model parameters. The performance of the methods is evaluated through extensive numerical simulations., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

We investigate the range estimate between two wireless nodes without time stamps exchanging. Considering practical aspects of oscillator clocks, we propose a new model for ranging in which the measurement errors include the sum of two distributions, namely, uniform and Gaussian. We then derive an approximate maximum likelihood estimator (AMLE), which poses a difficult global optimization problem. To avoid the difficulty in solving the complex AMLE, we propose a simple estimator based on the method of moments. Numerical results show a promising performance for the proposed technique., Comment: 5 pages

Using a Bayesian approach, we consider the problem of recovering sparse signals under additive sparse and dense noise. Typically, sparse noise models outliers, impulse bursts or data loss. To handle sparse noise, existing methods simultaneously estimate the sparse signal of interest and the sparse noise of no interest. For estimating the sparse signal, without the need of estimating the sparse noise, we construct a robust Relevance Vector Machine (RVM). In the RVM, sparse noise and ever present dense noise are treated through a combined noise model. The precision of combined noise is modeled by a diagonal matrix. We show that the new RVM update equations correspond to a non-symmetric sparsity inducing cost function. Further, the combined modeling is found to be computationally more efficient. We also extend the method to block-sparse signals and noise with known and unknown block structures. Through simulations, we show the performance and computation efficiency of the new RVM in several applications: recovery of sparse and block sparse signals, housing price prediction and image denoising., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

In many fields, and especially in the medical and social sciences and in recommender systems, data are gathered through clinical studies or targeted surveys. Participants are generally reluctant to respond to all questions in a survey or they may lack information to respond adequately to some questions. The data collected from these studies tend to lead to linear regression models where the regression vectors are only known partially: some of their entries are either missing completely or replaced randomly by noisy values. In this work, assuming missing positions are replaced by noisy values, we examine how a connected network of agents, with each one of them subjected to a stream of data with incomplete regression information, can cooperate with each other through local interactions to estimate the underlying model parameters in the presence of missing data. We explain how to adjust the distributed diffusion through (de)regularization in order to eliminate the bias introduced by the incomplete model. We also propose a technique to recursively estimate the (de)regularization parameter and examine the performance of the resulting strategy. We illustrate the results by considering two applications: one dealing with a mental health survey and the other dealing with a household consumption survey., Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing Over Networks

This article focuses on the problem of reconstructing low-rank matrices from underdetermined measurements using alternating optimization strategies. We endeavour to combine an alternating least-squares based estimation strategy with ideas from the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to recover structured low-rank matrices, such as Hankel structure. We show that merging these two alternating strategies leads to a better performance than the existing alternating least squares (ALS) strategy. The performance is evaluated via numerical simulations.

In this paper we develop a new Bayesian inference method for low rank matrix reconstruction. We call the new method the Relevance Singular Vector Machine (RSVM) where appropriate priors are defined on the singular vectors of the underlying matrix to promote low rank. To accelerate computations, a numerically efficient approximation is developed. The proposed algorithms are applied to matrix completion and matrix reconstruction problems and their performance is studied numerically., Comment: International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM), 5 pages

We consider the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in unknown partially correlated noise environments where the noise covariance matrix is sparse. A sparse noise covariance matrix is a common model for a sparse array of sensors consisted of several widely separated subarrays. Since interelement spacing among sensors in a subarray is small, the noise in the subarray is in general spatially correlated, while, due to large distances between subarrays, the noise between them is uncorrelated. Consequently, the noise covariance matrix of such an array has a block diagonal structure which is indeed sparse. Moreover, in an ordinary nonsparse array, because of small distance between adjacent sensors, there is noise coupling between neighboring sensors, whereas one can assume that nonadjacent sensors have spatially uncorrelated noise which makes again the array noise covariance matrix sparse. Utilizing some recently available tools in low-rank/sparse matrix decomposition, matrix completion, and sparse representation, we propose a novel method which can resolve possibly correlated or even coherent sources in the aforementioned partly correlated noise. In particular, when the sources are uncorrelated, our approach involves solving a second-order cone programming (SOCP), and if they are correlated or coherent, one needs to solve a computationally harder convex program. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by numerical simulations and comparison to the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB)., Comment: in IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel signal processing workshop (SAM), 2014

We derive a maximum a posteriori estimator for the linear observation model, where the signal and noise covariance matrices are both uncertain. The uncertainties are treated probabilistically by modeling the covariance matrices with prior inverse-Wishart distributions. The nonconvex problem of jointly estimating the signal of interest and the covariance matrices is tackled by a computationally efficient fixed-point iteration as well as an approximate variational Bayes solution. The statistical performance of estimators is compared numerically to state-of-the-art estimators from the literature and shown to perform favorably.

For array processing, we consider the problem of estimating signals of interest, and their directions of arrival (DOA), in unknown colored noise fields. We develop an estimator that efficiently utilizes a set of noise-only samples and, further, can incorporate prior knowledge of the DOAs with varying degrees of certainty. The estimator is compared with state of the art estimators that utilize noise-only samples, and the Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound, exhibiting improved performance for smaller sample sets and in poor signal conditions.

For line spectrum estimation, we derive the maximum a posteriori probability estimator where prior knowledge of frequencies is modeled probabilistically. Since the spectrum is periodic, an appropriate distribution is the circular von Mises distribution that can parameterize the entire range of prior certainty of the frequencies. An efficient alternating projections method is used to solve the resulting optimization problem. The estimator is evaluated numerically and compared with other estimators and the Cram\'er-Rao bound.

In this paper, the problem of training optimization for estimating a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) flat fading channel in the presence of spatially and temporally correlated Gaussian noise is studied in an application-oriented setup. So far, the problem of MIMO channel estimation has mostly been treated within the context of minimizing the mean square error (MSE) of the channel estimate subject to various constraints, such as an upper bound on the available training energy. We introduce a more general framework for the task of training sequence design in MIMO systems, which can treat not only the minimization of channel estimator's MSE, but also the optimization of a final performance metric of interest related to the use of the channel estimate in the communication system. First, we show that the proposed framework can be used to minimize the training energy budget subject to a quality constraint on the MSE of the channel estimator. A deterministic version of the "dual" problem is also provided. We then focus on four specific applications, where the training sequence can be optimized with respect to the classical channel estimation MSE, a weighted channel estimation MSE and the MSE of the equalization error due to the use of an equalizer at the receiver or an appropriate linear precoder at the transmitter. In this way, the intended use of the channel estimate is explicitly accounted for. The superiority of the proposed designs over existing methods is demonstrated via numerical simulations.

We consider the problem of estimating a random state vector when there is information about the maximum distances between its subvectors. The estimation problem is posed in a Bayesian framework in which the minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimate of the state is given by the conditional mean. Since finding the conditional mean requires multidimensional integration, an approximate MMSE estimator is proposed. The performance of the proposed estimator is evaluated in a positioning problem. Finally, the application of the estimator in inequality constrained recursive filtering is illustrated by applying the estimator to a dead-reckoning problem. The MSE of the estimator is compared with two related posterior Cram\'er-Rao bounds., Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures

For reconstruction of low-rank matrices from undersampled measurements, we develop an iterative algorithm based on least-squares estimation. While the algorithm can be used for any low-rank matrix, it is also capable of exploiting a-priori knowledge of matrix structure. In particular, we consider linearly structured matrices, such as Hankel and Toeplitz, as well as positive semidefinite matrices. The performance of the algorithm, referred to as alternating least-squares (ALS), is evaluated by simulations and compared to the Cram\'er-Rao bounds., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

For compressive sensing of dynamic sparse signals, we develop an iterative pursuit algorithm. A dynamic sparse signal process is characterized by varying sparsity patterns over time/space. For such signals, the developed algorithm is able to incorporate sequential predictions, thereby providing better compressive sensing recovery performance, but not at the cost of high complexity. Through experimental evaluations, we observe that the new algorithm exhibits a graceful degradation at deteriorating signal conditions while capable of yielding substantial performance gains as conditions improve., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing