English

The Computational Complexity of the Restricted Isometry Property, the Nullspace Property, and Related Concepts in Compressed Sensing

Optimization and Control 2013-11-05 v6 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

This paper deals with the computational complexity of conditions which guarantee that the NP-hard problem of finding the sparsest solution to an underdetermined linear system can be solved by efficient algorithms. In the literature, several such conditions have been introduced. The most well-known ones are the mutual coherence, the restricted isometry property (RIP), and the nullspace property (NSP). While evaluating the mutual coherence of a given matrix is easy, it has been suspected for some time that evaluating RIP and NSP is computationally intractable in general. We confirm these conjectures by showing that for a given matrix A and positive integer k, computing the best constants for which the RIP or NSP hold is, in general, NP-hard. These results are based on the fact that determining the spark of a matrix is NP-hard, which is also established in this paper. Furthermore, we also give several complexity statements about problems related to the above concepts.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.2081,
  title  = {The Computational Complexity of the Restricted Isometry Property, the Nullspace Property, and Related Concepts in Compressed Sensing},
  author = {Andreas M. Tillmann and Marc E. Pfetsch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.2081},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

13 pages; accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory