Local Identification of Overcomplete Dictionaries

This paper presents the first theoretical results showing that stable identification of overcomplete $\mu$-coherent dictionaries $\dico \in \R^{d\times K}$ is locally possible from training signals with sparsity levels $S$ up to the order $O(\mu^{-2})$ and signal to noise ratios up to $O(\sqrt{d})$. In particular the dictionary is recoverable as the local maximum of a new maximisation criterion that generalises the K-means criterion. For this maximisation criterion results for asymptotic exact recovery for sparsity levels up to $O(\mu^{-1})$ and stable recovery for sparsity levels up to $O(\mu^{-2})$ as well as signal to noise ratios up to $O(\sqrt{d})$ are provided. These asymptotic results translate to finite sample size recovery results with high probability as long as the sample size $N$ scales as $O(K^3dS \tilde \eps^{-2})$, where the recovery precision $\tilde \eps$ can go down to the asymptotically achievable precision. Further to actually find the local maxima of the new criterion, a very simple Iterative Thresholding & K (signed) Means algorithm (ITKM), which has complexity $O(dKN)$ in each iteration, is presented and its local efficiency is demonstrated in several experiments.