BEHAVIOR OF GREEDY SPARSE REPRESENTATION ALGORITHMS ON NESTED SUPPORTS

Abstract : In this work, we study the links between the recovery proper- ties of sparse signals for Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and the whole General MP class over nested supports. We show that the optimality of those algorithms is not locally nested: there is a dictionary and supports I and J with J included in I such that OMP will recover all signals of sup- port I, but not all signals of support J. We also show that the optimality of OMP is globally nested: if OMP can recover all s-sparse signals, then it can recover all s′-sparse signals with s′ smaller than s. We also provide a tighter version of Donoho and Elad's spark theorem, which allows us to com- plete Tropp's proof that sparse representation algorithms can only be optimal for all s-sparse signals if s is strictly lower than half the spark of the dictionary.