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Abstract Matrix concentration inequalities give bounds for the spectral-norm deviation of a random matrix from its expected value. These results have a weak dimensional dependence that is sometimes, but not always, necessary. This paper identifies one of the sources of the dimensional term and exploits this insight to develop sharper matrix concentration inequalities. In particular, this analysis delivers two refinements of the matrix Khintchine inequality that use information beyond the matrix variance to improve the dimensional dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes the restricted isometry property for a Gabor system generated by n time-frequency shifts of a random window function in n dimensions. The sth order restricted isometry constant of the associated n × n Gabor synthesis matrix is small provided that s ≤ c n / log n. This bound provides a qualitative improvement over previous estimates, which achieve only quadratic scaling of the sparsity s with respect to n. The proof depends on an estimate for the expected supremum of a second-order chaos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covariance estimation becomes challenging in the regime where the number p of variables outstrips the number n of samples available to construct the estimate. One way to circumvent this problem is to assume that the covariance matrix is nearly sparse and to focus on estimating only the significant entries. To analyse this approach, Levina & Vershynin (2011, Probab. Theory Related Fields) introduce a formalism called masked covariance estimation, where each entry of the sample covariance estimator is reweighted to reflect an a priori assessment of its importance. This paper provides a short analysis of the masked sample covariance estimator by means of a matrix concentration inequality. The main result applies to general distributions with at least four moments. Specialized to the case of a Gaussian distribution, the theory offers qualitative improvements over earlier work. For example, the new results show that n=O(B log2 p) samples suffice to estimate a banded covariance matrix with bandwidth B up to a relative spectral-norm error, in contrast to the sample complexity n=O(B log5 p) obtained by Levina and Vershynin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents new probability inequalities for sums of independent, random, self-adjoint matrices. These results place simple and easily verifiable hypotheses on the summands, and they deliver strong conclusions about the large-deviation behavior of the maximum eigenvalue of the sum. Tail bounds for the norm of a sum of random rectangular matrices follow as an immediate corollary. The proof techniques also yield some information about matrix-valued martingales. In other words, this paper provides noncommutative generalizations of the classical bounds associated with the names Azuma, Bennett, Bernstein, Chernoff, Hoeffding, and McDiarmid. The matrix inequalities promise the same diversity of application, ease of use, and strength of conclusion that have made the scalar inequalities so valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note demonstrates that it is possible to bound the expectation of an arbitrary norm of a random matrix drawn from the Stiefel manifold in terms of the expected norm of a standard Gaussian matrix with the same dimensions. A related comparison holds for any convex function of a random matrix drawn from the Stiefel manifold. For certain norms, a reversed inequality is also valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Many problems in the theory of sparse approximation require bounds on operator norms of a random submatrix drawn from a fixed matrix. The purpose of this Note is to collect estimates for several different norms that are most important in the analysis of minimization algorithms. Several of these bounds have not appeared in detail. To cite this article: J.A. Tropp, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 346 (2008). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An important problem in the theory of sparse approximation is to identify well-conditioned subsets of vectors from a general dictionary. In most cases, current results do not apply unless the number of vectors is smaller than the square root of the ambient dimension, so these bounds are too weak for many applications. This paper shatters the square-root bottleneck by focusing on random subdictionaries instead of arbitrary subdictionaries. It provides explicit bounds on the extreme singular values of random subdictionaries that hold with overwhelming probability. The results are phrased in terms of the coherence and spectral norm of the dictionary, which capture information about its global geometry. The proofs rely on standard tools from the area of Banach space probability. As an application, the paper shows that the conditioning of a subdictionary is the major obstacle to the uniqueness of sparse representations and the success of minimization techniques for signal recovery. Indeed, if a fixed subdictionary is well conditioned and its cardinality is slightly smaller than the ambient dimension, then a random signal formed from this subdictionary almost surely has no other representation that is equally sparse. Moreover, with overwhelming probability, the maximally sparse representation can be identified via minimization. Note that the results in this paper are not directly comparable with recent work on subdictionaries of random dictionaries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]