Sparse Phase Retrieval via Truncated Amplitude Flow

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Given observed data {psi_i}_{i=1}^m and feature vectors {a_iin R^n/C^n}_{i=1}^m, our goal is to solve for a k-sparse x from a system of (phaseless) quadratic equations psi_iapprox |langle a_i,xrangle|, 1le ile m.

With sample complexity O(k^2log n) and computational complexity O(k^2nlog n), our SPARTA provably recovers the true solution exactly.

Sparse Phase Retrieval via Truncated Amplitude Flow.

Authors: G. Wang, L. Zhang, G. B. Giannakis, M. Akcakaya, and J. Chen

This paper develops a novel algorithm, termed emph{SPARse Truncated Amplitude flow} (SPARTA), to reconstruct a sparse signal from a small number of magnitude-only measurements. It deals with what is also known as sparse phase retrieval (PR), which is emph{NP-hard} in general and emerges in many science and engineering applications. Upon formulating sparse PR as an amplitude-based nonconvex optimization task, SPARTA works iteratively in two stages: In stage one, the support of the underlying sparse signal is recovered using an analytically well-justified rule, and subsequently a sparse orthogonality-promoting initialization is obtained via power iterations restricted on the support; and, in stage two, the initialization is successively refined by means of hard thresholding based truncated gradient iterations. SPARTA is a simple yet effective, scalable, and fast sparse PR solver. On the theoretical side, for any n-dimensional k-sparse (kll n) signal x with minimum (in modulus) nonzero entries on the order of (1/sqrt{k})|x|_2, SPARTA recovers the signal exactly (up to a global unimodular constant) from about k^2log n random Gaussian measurements with high probability. Furthermore, SPARTA incurs computational complexity on the order of k^2nlog n with total runtime proportional to the time required to read the data, which improves upon the state-of-the-art by at least a factor of k. Finally, SPARTA is robust against additive noise of bounded support. Extensive numerical tests corroborate markedly improved recovery performance and speedups of SPARTA relative to existing alternatives.