Majority Vote Compressed Sensing

We consider the problem of non-coherent over-the-air computation (AirComp), where $n$ devices carry high-dimensional data vectors $\mathbf{x}_i\in\mathbb{R}^d$ of sparsity $\lVert\mathbf{x}_i\rVert_0\leq k$ whose sum has to be computed at a receiver. Previous results on non-coherent AirComp require more than $d$ channel uses to compute functions of $\mathbf{x}_i$, where the extra redundancy is used to combat non-coherent signal aggregation. However, if the data vectors are sparse, sparsity can be exploited to offer significantly cheaper communication. In this paper, we propose to use random transforms to transmit lower-dimensional projections $\mathbf{s}_i\in\mathbb{R}^T$ of the data vectors. These projected vectors are communicated to the receiver using a majority vote (MV)-AirComp scheme, which estimates the bit-vector corresponding to the signs of the aggregated projections, i.e., $\mathbf{y} = \text{sign}(\sum_i\mathbf{s}_i)$. By leveraging 1-bit compressed sensing (1bCS) at the receiver, the real-valued and high-dimensional aggregate $\sum_i\mathbf{x}_i$ can be recovered from $\mathbf{y}$. We prove analytically that the proposed MVCS scheme estimates the aggregated data vector $\sum_i \mathbf{x}_i$ with $\ell_2$-norm error $\epsilon$ in $T=\mathcal{O}(kn\log(d)/\epsilon^2)$ channel uses. Moreover, we specify algorithms that leverage MVCS for histogram estimation and distributed machine learning. Finally, we provide numerical evaluations that reveal the advantage of MVCS compared to the state-of-the-art.