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Testing Sparsity over Known and Unknown Bases
Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 80:491-500, 2018.
Abstract
Sparsity is a basic property of real vectors that is exploited in a wide variety of machine learning applications. In this work, we describe property testing algorithms for sparsity that observe a low-dimensional projec- tion of the input. We consider two settings. In the first setting, we test sparsity with respect to an unknown basis: given input vectors y1,...,yp∈Rd whose concatenation as columns forms Y∈Rd×p , does Y=AX for matrices A∈Rd×m and X∈Rm×p such that each column of X is k-sparse, or is Y “far” from having such a decomposition? In the second setting, we test sparsity with respect to a known basis: for a fixed design ma- trix A∈Rd×m , given input vector y∈Rd , is y=Ax for some k-sparse vector x or is y “far” from having such a decomposition? We analyze our algorithms using tools from high-dimensional geometry and probability.