We study direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation from coarsely quantized data. We focus on a two-step approach which first estimates the signal subspace via covariance estimation and then extracts DOA angles by the ESPRIT algorithm. In particular, we analyze two stochastic quantization schemes which use dithering: a one-bit quantizer combined with rectangular dither and a multi-bit quantizer with triangular dither. For each quantizer, we derive rigorous high probability bounds for the distances between the true and estimated signal subspaces and DOA angles. Using our analysis, we identify scenarios in which subspace and DOA estimation via triangular dithering qualitatively outperforms rectangular dithering. We verify in numerical simulations that our estimates are optimal in their dependence on the smallest non-zero eigenvalue of the target matrix. The resulting subspace estimation guarantees are equally applicable in the analysis of other spectral estimation algorithms and related problems.

In practice, deep neural networks are often able to easily interpolate their training data. To understand this phenomenon, many works have aimed to quantify the memorization capacity of a neural network architecture: the largest number of points such that the architecture can interpolate any placement of these points with any assignment of labels. For real-world data, however, one intuitively expects the presence of a benign structure so that interpolation already occurs at a smaller network size than suggested by memorization capacity. In this paper, we investigate interpolation by adopting an instance-specific viewpoint. We introduce a simple randomized algorithm that, given a fixed finite data set with two classes, with high probability constructs an interpolating three-layer neural network in polynomial time. The required number of parameters is linked to geometric properties of the two classes and their mutual arrangement. As a result, we obtain guarantees that are independent of the number of samples and hence move beyond worst-case memorization capacity bounds. We verify our theoretical result with numerical experiments and additionally investigate the effectiveness of the algorithm on MNIST and CIFAR-10.

Abstract. We consider the problem of embedding a subset of [Formula: see text] into a low-dimensional Hamming cube in an almost isometric way. We construct a simple, data-oblivious, and computationally efficient map that achieves this task with high probability; we first apply a specific structured random matrix, which we call the double circulant matrix; using that a matrix requires linear storage and matrix-vector multiplication that can be performed in near-linear time. We then binarize each vector by comparing each of its entries to a random threshold, selected uniformly at random from a well-chosen interval. We estimate the number of bits required for this encoding scheme in terms of two natural geometric complexity parameters of the set: its Euclidean covering numbers and its localized Gaussian complexity. The estimate we derive turns out to be the best that one can hope for, up to logarithmic terms. The key to the proof is a phenomenon of independent interest: we show that the double circulant matrix mimics the behavior of the Gaussian matrix in two important ways. First, it maps an arbitrary set in [Formula: see text] into a set of well-spread vectors. Second, it yields a fast near-isometric embedding of any finite subset of [Formula: see text] into [Formula: see text]. This embedding achieves the same dimension reduction as the Gaussian matrix in near-linear time, under an optimal condition—up to logarithmic factors—on the number of points to be embedded. This improves a well-known construction due to Ailon and Chazelle.

As the array dimension of massive MIMO systems increases to unprecedented levels, two problems occur. First, the spatial stationarity assumption along the antenna elements is no longer valid. Second, the large array size results in an unacceptably high power consumption if high-resolution analog-to-digital converters are used. To address these two challenges, we consider a Bussgang linear minimum mean square error (BLMMSE)-based channel estimator for large scale massive MIMO systems with one-bit quantizers and a spatially non-stationary channel. Whereas other works usually assume that the channel covariance is known at the base station, we consider a plug-in BLMMSE estimator that uses an estimate of the channel covariance and rigorously analyze the distortion produced by using an estimated, rather than the true, covariance. To cope with the spatial non-stationarity, we introduce dithering into the quantized signals and provide a theoretical error analysis. In addition, we propose an angular domain fitting procedure which is based on solving an instance of non-negative least squares. For the multi-user data transmission phase, we further propose a BLMMSE-based receiver to handle one-bit quantized data signals. Our numerical results show that the performance of the proposed BLMMSE channel estimator is very close to the oracle-aided scheme with ideal knowledge of the channel covariance matrix. The BLMMSE receiver outperforms the conventional maximum-ratio-combining and zero-forcing receivers in terms of the resulting ergodic sum rate.

We consider covariance estimation of any subgaussian distribution from finitely many i.i.d. samples that are quantized to one bit of information per entry. Recent work has shown that a reliable estimator can be constructed if uniformly distributed dithers on [-λ,λ] are used in the one-bit quantizer. This estimator enjoys near-minimax optimal, non-asymptotic error estimates in the operator and Frobenius norms if λ is chosen proportional to the largest variance of the distribution. However, this quantity is not known a-priori, and in practice λ needs to be carefully tuned to achieve good performance. In this work we resolve this problem by introducing a tuning-free variant of this estimator, which replaces λ by a data-driven quantity. We prove that this estimator satisfies the same non-asymptotic error estimates — up to small (logarithmic) losses and a slightly worse probability estimate. We also show that by using refined data-driven dithers that vary per entry of each sample, one can construct an estimator satisfying the same estimation error bound as the sample covariance of the samples before quantization — again up logarithmic losses. Our proofs rely on a new version of the Burkholder-Rosenthal inequalities for matrix martingales, which is expected to be of independent interest.

Neural networks with random weights appear in a variety of machine learning applications, most prominently as the initialization of many deep learning algorithms and as a computationally cheap alternative to fully learned neural networks. In the present article, we enhance the theoretical understanding of random neural networks by addressing the following data separation problem: under what conditions can a random neural network make two classes $\mathcal{X}^-, \mathcal{X}^+ \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ (with positive distance) linearly separable? We show that a sufficiently large two-layer ReLU-network with standard Gaussian weights and uniformly distributed biases can solve this problem with high probability. Crucially, the number of required neurons is explicitly linked to geometric properties of the underlying sets $\mathcal{X}^-, \mathcal{X}^+$ and their mutual arrangement. This instance-specific viewpoint allows us to overcome the usual curse of dimensionality (exponential width of the layers) in non-pathological situations where the data carries low-complexity structure. We quantify the relevant structure of the data in terms of a novel notion of mutual complexity (based on a localized version of Gaussian mean width), which leads to sound and informative separation guarantees. We connect our result with related lines of work on approximation, memorization, and generalization.

We consider the problem of recovering sparse vectors from underdetermined linear measurements via ℓp-constrained basis pursuit. Previous analyses of this problem based on generalized restricted isometry properties have suggested that two phenomena occur if p ≠ 2. First, one may need substantially more than s log(en/s) measurements (optimal for p = 2) for uniform recovery of all s-sparse vectors. Second, the matrix that achieves recovery with the optimal number of measurements may not be Gaussian (as for p = 2). We present a new, direct analysis, which shows that in fact neither of these phenomena occur. Via a suitable version of the null space property, we show that a standard Gaussian matrix provides ℓq/ℓ1-recovery guarantees for ℓp-constrained basis pursuit in the optimal measurement regime. Our result extends to several heavier-tailed measurement matrices. As an application, we show that one can obtain a consistent reconstruction from uniform scalar quantized measurements in the optimal measurement regime.

Let Φ∈Rm x n be a sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform [52] with column sparsity s. For a subset T of the unit sphere and ε∈(0,1/2), we study settings for m,s to ensure EΦ supx∈ T |Φ x|22 - 1| < ε, i.e. so that Φ preserves the norm of every x ∈ T simultaneously and multiplicatively up to 1+ε. We introduce a new complexity parameter, which depends on the geometry of T, and show that it suffices to choose s and m such that this parameter is small. Our result is a sparse analog of Gordon's theorem, which was concerned with a dense Φ having i.i.d. Gaussian entries. We qualitatively unify several results related to the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, subspace embeddings, and Fourier-based restricted isometries. Our work also implies new results in using the sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform in randomized linear algebra, compressed sensing, manifold learning, and constrained least squares problems such as the Lasso.