Sparse Recovery of Nonnegative Signals With Minimal Expansion

We investigate the problem of reconstructing a high-dimensional nonnegative sparse vector from lower-dimensional linear measurements. While much work has focused on dense measurement matrices, sparse measurement schemes can be more efficient both with respect to signal sensing as well as reconstruction complexity. Known constructions use the adjacency matrices of expander graphs, which often lead to recovery algorithms which are much more efficient than minimization. However, prior constructions of sparse measurement matrices rely on expander graphs with very high expansion coefficients which make the construction of such graphs difficult and the size of the recoverable sets very small. In this paper, we introduce sparse measurement matrices for the recovery of nonnegative vectors, using perturbations of the adjacency matrices of expander graphs requiring much smaller expansion coefficients, hereby referred to as minimal expanders. We show that when minimization is used as the reconstruction method, these constructions allow the recovery of signals that are almost three orders of magnitude larger compared to the existing theoretical results for sparse measurement matrices. We provide for the first time tight upper bounds for the so called weak and strong recovery thresholds when minimization is used. We further show that the success of optimization is equivalent to the existence of a “unique” vector in the set of solutions to the linear equations, which enables alternative algorithms for minimization. We further show that the defined minimal expansion property is necessary for all measurement matrices for compressive sensing, (even when the non-negativity assumption is removed) therefore implying that our construction is tight. We finally present a novel recovery algorithm that exploits expansion and is much more computationally efficient compared to minimization.