No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we study the system identification problem for sparse linear time-invariant systems. We propose a sparsity promoting block-regularized estimator to identify the dynamics of the system with only a limited number of input-state data samples. We characterize the properties of this estimator under high-dimensional scaling, where the growth rate of the system dimension is comparable to or even faster than that of the number of available sample trajectories. In particular, using contemporary results on high-dimensional statistics, we show that the proposed estimator results in a small element-wise error, provided that the number of sample trajectories is above a threshold. This threshold depends polynomially on the size of each block and the number of nonzero elements at different rows of input and state matrices, but only logarithmically on the system dimension. A by-product of this result is that the number of sample trajectories required for sparse system identification is significantly smaller than the dimension of the system. Furthermore, we show that, unlike the recently celebrated least-squares estimators for system identification problems, the method developed in this work is capable of textit{exact recovery} of the underlying sparsity structure of the system with the aforementioned number of data samples. Extensive case studies on synthetically generated systems, physical mass-spring networks, and multi-agent systems are offered to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
The goal of predictive sparse coding is to learn a representation of examples as sparse linear combinations of elements from a dictionary, such that a learned hypothesis linear in the new representation performs well on a predictive task. Predictive sparse coding algorithms recently have demonstrated impressive performance on a variety of supervised tasks, but their generalization properties have not been studied. We establish the first generalization error bounds for predictive sparse coding, covering two settings: 1) the overcomplete setting, where the number of features k exceeds the original dimensionality d; and 2) the high or infinite-dimensional setting, where only dimension-free bounds are useful. Both learning bounds intimately depend on stability properties of the learned sparse encoder, as measured on the training sample. Consequently, we first present a fundamental stability result for the LASSO, a result characterizing the stability of the sparse codes with respect to perturbations to the dictionary. In the overcomplete setting, we present an estimation error bound that decays as tilde{O}(sqrt(d k/m)) with respect to d and k. In the high or infinite-dimensional setting, we show a dimension-free bound that is tilde{O}(sqrt(k^2 s / m)) with respect to k and s, where s is an upper bound on the number of non-zeros in the sparse code for any training data point.
The hidden subgroup problem ($mathsf{HSP}$) has been attracting much attention in quantum computing, since several well-known quantum algorithms including Shor algorithm can be described in a uniform framework as quantum methods to address different instances of it. One of the central issues about $mathsf{HSP}$ is to characterize its quantum/classical complexity. For example, from the viewpoint of learning theory, sample complexity is a crucial concept. However, while the quantum sample complexity of the problem has been studied, a full characterization of the classical sample complexity of $mathsf{HSP}$ seems to be absent, which will thus be the topic in this paper. $mathsf{HSP}$ over a finite group is defined as follows: For a finite group $G$ and a finite set $V$, given a function $f:G to V$ and the promise that for any $x, y in G, f(x) = f(xy)$ iff $y in H$ for a subgroup $H in mathcal{H}$, where $mathcal{H}$ is a set of candidate subgroups of $G$, the goal is to identify $H$. Our contributions are as follows: For $mathsf{HSP}$, we give the upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity of $mathsf{HSP}$. Furthermore, we have applied the result to obtain the sample complexity of some concrete instances of hidden subgroup problem. Particularly, we discuss generalized Simons problem ($mathsf{GSP}$), a special case of $mathsf{HSP}$, and show that the sample complexity of $mathsf{GSP}$ is $Thetaleft(maxleft{k,sqrt{kcdot p^{n-k}}right}right)$. Thus we obtain a complete characterization of the sample complexity of $mathsf{GSP}$.
In this short paper, we aim at developing algorithms for sparse Volterra system identification when the system to be identified has infinite impulse response. Assuming that the impulse response is represented as a sum of exponentials and given input-output data, the problem of interest is to find the simplest nonlinear Volterra model which is compatible with the a priori information and the collected data. By simplest, we mean the model whose impulse response has the least number of exponentials. The algorithms provided are able to handle both fragmented data and measurement noise. Academic examples at the end of paper show the efficacy of proposed approach.
This paper addresses the problem of identifying sparse linear time-invariant (LTI) systems from a single sample trajectory generated by the system dynamics. We introduce a Lasso-like estimator for the parameters of the system, taking into account their sparse nature. Assuming that the system is stable, or that it is equipped with an initial stabilizing controller, we provide sharp finite-time guarantees on the accurate recovery of both the sparsity structure and the parameter values of the system. In particular, we show that the proposed estimator can correctly identify the sparsity pattern of the system matrices with high probability, provided that the length of the sample trajectory exceeds a threshold. Furthermore, we show that this threshold scales polynomially in the number of nonzero elements in the system matrices, but logarithmically in the system dimensions --- this improves on existing sample complexity bounds for the sparse system identification problem. We further extend these results to obtain sharp bounds on the $ell_{infty}$-norm of the estimation error and show how different properties of the system---such as its stability level and textit{mutual incoherency}---affect this bound. Finally, an extensive case study on power systems is presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimation method.
We consider the distinct elements problem, where the goal is to estimate the number of distinct colors in an urn containing $ k $ balls based on $n$ samples drawn with replacements. Based on discrete polynomial approximation and interpolation, we propose an estimator with additive error guarantee that achieves the optimal sample complexity within $O(loglog k)$ factors, and in fact within constant factors for most cases. The estimator can be computed in $O(n)$ time for an accurate estimation. The result also applies to sampling without replacement provided the sample size is a vanishing fraction of the urn size. One of the key auxiliary results is a sharp bound on the minimum singular values of a real rectangular Vandermonde matrix, which might be of independent interest.