Sensing Matrices
Contents
13.1. Sensing MatricesΒΆ
13.1.1. Matrices Satisfying RIPΒΆ
This section provides basic results about construction of matrices which can satisfy restricted isometry property.
The goal of designing an
Stable embedding for signals with has high sparsity as possible (high
)As few measurements as possible (low
)
There are two different approaches
Deterministic approach
Randomized approach
Known deterministic approaches so far tend to require
Construction process:
Input
and .Generate
by choosing as independent realizations from some probability distribution.
Suppose that
It can be shown that the rank of
Example 13.1 (Random matrices are full rank.)
We can verify this fact by doing a small computer simulation.
M = 6;
N = 20;
trials = 10000;
numFullRankMatrices = 0;
for i=1:trials
% Create a random matrix of size M x N
A = rand(M,N);
% Obtain its rank
R = rank(A);
% Check whether the rank equals M or not
if R == M
numFullRankMatrices = numFullRankMatrices + 1;
end
end
fprintf('Number of trials: %d\n',trials);
fprintf('Number of full rank matrices: %d\n',numFullRankMatrices);
percentage = numFullRankMatrices*100/trials;
fprintf('Percentage of full rank matrices: %.2f %%\n', percentage);
This program generates a number of random matrices and measures their ranks. It verifies whether they are full rank or not.
Here is a sample output:
>> demoRandomMatrixRank
Number of trials: 10000
Number of full rank matrices: 10000
Percentage of full rank matrices: 100.00
Thus if we choose
We can start with a chosen value of
Before we proceed further, we should take a detour and review sub-Gaussian distributions in Subgaussian Distributions.
We now state the main theorem of this section.
Theorem 13.1 (Norm bounds on subgaussian vectors)
Suppose that
Moreover, for any
and
13.1.1.1. Conditions on Random Distribution for RIPΒΆ
Let us get back to our business of constructing a matrix
We require that the distribution will yield a matrix that is norm-preserving. This requires that
(13.1)ΒΆHence variance of distribution should be
.We require that distribution is a sub-Gaussian distribution; i.e., there exists a constant
such that(13.2)ΒΆ
This says that the moment generating function of the distribution
is dominated by a Gaussian distribution.
In other words, tails of the distribution decay at least as fast as the tails of a Gaussian distribution.
We will further assume that entries of
are strictly sub-Gaussian. i.e., they must satisfy (13.2) with
Under these conditions we have the following result.
Corollary 13.1 (Norm bounds on subgaussian matrix vector product)
Suppose that
Let
and
where
This means that the norm of a sub-Gaussian random vector strongly concentrates about its mean.
13.1.1.2. Sub Gaussian Matrices satisfy the RIPΒΆ
Using this result we now state that sub-Gaussian matrices satisfy the RIP.
Theorem 13.2 (Lower bound on required number of measurements)
Fix
then
We note that this theorem achieves
This is much better than deterministic approaches.
13.1.1.3. Advantages of Random ConstructionΒΆ
There are a number of advantages of the random sensing matrix construction approach:
One can show that for random construction, the measurements are democratic. This means that all measurements are equal in importance and it is possible to recover the signal from any sufficiently large subset of the measurements.
Thus by using random
one can be robust to the loss of loss or corruption of a small fraction of measurements.In general we are more interested in
which is sparse in some basis . In this setting, we require that satisfy the RIP.Deterministic construction would explicitly require taking
into account.But if
is random, we can avoid this issue.If
is Gaussian and is an orthonormal basis, then one can easily show that will also have a Gaussian distribution.Thus if
is high, will also satisfy RIP with very high probability.Similar results hold for other sub-Gaussian distributions as well.
13.1.2. Rademacher Sensing MatricesΒΆ
In this subsection, we collect several results related to Rademacher sensing matrices.
Definition 13.1
A Rademacher sensing matrix
Thus
We can remove the scale factor
With that we can draw individual entries of
Thus entries in
This construction is useful since it allows us to implement the multiplication
with
We note that
Actually we have a better result with
We can write
where
In this case we also have
Thus the squared length of each of the columns in
Lemma 13.1
Let
Representative values of this bound are plotted below.

Fig. 13.1 Tail bound for the probability of inner product of a Rademacher random vector with a unit norm vectorΒΆ
Proof. This can be proven using Hoeffdingβs inequality. To be elaborated later.
A particular application of this lemma is when
The lemma establishes that the probability of inner product of two independent unit norm Rademacher random vectors being large is very very small. In other words, independently chosen unit norm Rademacher random vectors are incoherent with high probability. This is a very useful result as we will see later in measurement of coherence of Rademacher sensing matrices.
13.1.2.1. Joint CorrelationΒΆ
Columns of
Lemma 13.2
Let
Proof. Let us call
We note that if for any
, and we increase the length of by scaling it, then will not decrease and hence will not increase.Thus if we prove the bound for vectors
with , it will be applicable for all whose norms do not exceed one.Hence we will assume that
.From Lemma 13.1 we have
Now the event
i.e. if any of the inner products (absolute value) is greater than
then the maximum is greater.We recall Booleβs inequality which states that
Thus
This gives us
13.1.2.2. CoherenceΒΆ
We show that coherence of Rademacher sensing matrix is fairly small with high probability (adapted from [38]).
Lemma 13.3
Fix
with probability exceeding

Fig. 13.2 Coherence bounds for Rademacher sensing matricesΒΆ
Proof. We recall the definition of coherence as
Since
is a Rademacher sensing matrix hence each column of is unit norm column.Consider some
identifying columns and .We note that they are independent of each other.
Thus from Lemma 13.1 we have
Now there are
such pairs of .Hence by applying Booleβs inequality
Thus we have
What we need to do now is to choose a suitable value of
so that the R.H.S. of this inequality is simplified.We choose
This gives us
Putting back we get
This justifies why we need
.Finally
and
which completes the proof.
13.1.3. Gaussian Sensing MatricesΒΆ
In this subsection we collect several results related to Gaussian sensing matrices.
Definition 13.2
A Gaussian sensing matrix
We note that
We can write
where
Thus the expected value of squared length of each of the columns in
13.1.3.1. Joint CorrelationΒΆ
Columns of
Lemma 13.4
Let
Proof. Let us call
We note that if for any
, and we increase the length of by scaling it, then will not decrease and hence will not increase.Thus if we prove the bound for vectors
with , it will be applicable for all whose norms do not exceed one.Hence we will assume that
.Now consider
.Since
is a Gaussian random vector, hence is a Gaussian random variable.Since
henceWe recall a well known tail bound for Gaussian random variables which states that
Now the event
i.e. if any of the inner products (absolute value) is greater than
then the maximum is greater.We recall Booleβs inequality which states that
Thus
This gives us