Robustness of Sparse Recovery via $F$-minimization: A Topological Viewpoint

A recent trend in compressed sensing is to consider non-convex optimization techniques for sparse recovery. The important case of $F$-minimization has become of particular interest, for which the exact reconstruction condition (ERC) in the noiseless setting can be precisely characterized by the null space property (NSP). However, little work has been done concerning its robust reconstruction condition (RRC) in the noisy setting. We look at the null space of the measurement matrix as a point on the Grassmann manifold, and then study the relation between the ERC and RRC sets, denoted as $\Omega_J$ and $\Omega_J^r$, respectively. It is shown that $\Omega_J^r$ is the interior of $\Omega_J$, from which a previous result of the equivalence of ERC and RRC for $\ell_p$-minimization follows easily as a special case. Moreover, when $F$ is non-decreasing, it is shown that $\overline{\Omega}_J\setminus\interior(\Omega_J)$ is a set of measure zero and of the first category. As a consequence, the probabilities of ERC and RRC are the same if the measurement matrix $\mathbf{A}$ is randomly generated according to a continuous distribution. Quantitatively, if the null space $\mathcal{N}(\bf A)$ lies in the "$d$-interior" of $\Omega_J$, then RRC will be satisfied with the robustness constant $C=\frac{2+2d}{d\sigma_{\min}(\mathbf{A}^{\top})}$; and conversely if RRC holds with $C=\frac{2-2d}{d\sigma_{\max}(\mathbf{A}^{\top})}$, then $\mathcal{N}(\bf A)$ must lie in $d$-interior of $\Omega_J$. We also present several rules for comparing the performances of different cost functions. Finally, these results are capitalized to derive achievable tradeoffs between the measurement rate and robustness with the aid of Gordon's escape through the mesh theorem or a connection between NSP and the restricted eigenvalue condition.