For most large underdetermined systems of equations, the minimal 1-norm near-solution approximates the sparsest near-solution

TLDR: It is shown that for most Φ, if the optimally sparse approximation x0,ϵ is sufficiently sparse, then the solution x1, ϵ of the 𝓁1‐minimization problem is a good approximation to x0 ,ϵ.

Abstract: We consider inexact linear equations y ≈ Φx where y is a given vector in R n , Φ is a given n x m matrix, and we wish to find x 0,∈ as sparse as possible while obeying ∥y - Φx 0,∈ ∥ 2 ≤ ∈. In general, this requires combinatorial optimization and so is considered intractable. On the other hand, the l 1 -minimization problem min ∥x∥ 1 subject to ∥y - Φx∥ 2 ≤ e is convex and is considered tractable. We show that for most Φ, if the optimally sparse approximation x 0,∈ is sufficiently sparse, then the solution x 1,∈ of the l 1 -minimization problem is a good approximation to x 0,∈ . We suppose that the columns of Φ are normalized to the unit l 2 -norm, and we place uniform measure on such Φ. We study the underdetermined case where m ∼ τn and τ > 1, and prove the existence of p = p(r) > 0 and C = C(p, τ) so that for large n and for all Φ's except a negligible fraction, the following approximate sparse solution property of Φ holds: for every y having an approximation ∥y - Φx 0 ∥ 2 ≤ ∈ by a coefficient vector x 0 e R m with fewer than ρ · n nonzeros, ∥x 1,∈ - x 0 ∥ 2 ≤ C ≤ ∈. This has two implications. First, for most Φ, whenever the combinatorial optimization result x 0,∈ would be very sparse, x 1,∈ is a good approximation to x 0,∈ . Second, suppose we are given noisy data obeying y = Φx 0 + z where the unknown x 0 is known to be sparse and the noise ∥z∥ 2 ≤ ∈. For most Φ, noise-tolerant l 1 -minimization will stably recover x 0 from y in the presence of noise z. We also study the barely determined case m = n and reach parallel conclusions by slightly different arguments. Proof techniques include the use of almost-spherical sections in Banach space theory and concentration of measure for eigenvalues of random matrices.