Comparing measures of sparsity

  • Authors:
  • Niall Hurley;Scott Rickard

  • Affiliations:
  • Sparse Signal Processing Group, UCD Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory, University College Dublin, Ireland;Sparse Signal Processing Group, UCD Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory, University College Dublin, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 754.84

Visualization

Abstract

Sparsity of representations of signals has been shown to be a key concept of fundamental importance in fields such as blind source separation, compression, sampling and signal analysis. The aim of this paper is to compare several commonly-used sparsity measures based on intuitive attributes. Intuitively, a sparse representation is one in which a small number of coefficients contain a large proportion of the energy. In this paper, six properties are discussed: (Robin Hood, Scaling, Rising Tide, Cloning, Bill Gates, and Babies), each of which a sparsity measure should have. The main contributions of this paper are the proofs and the associated summary table which classify commonly-used sparsity measures based on whether or not they satisfy these six propositions. Only two of these measures satisfy all six: the pq-mean with p ≤ 1, q 1 and the Gini Index.