UNCERTAIN LINEAR EQUATIONS a

UNCERTAIN LINEAR EQUATIONS Mert Pilancı M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Orhan Arıkan July 2010 In this thesis, new theoretical and practical results on linear equations with various types of uncertainties and their applications are presented. In the first part, the case in which there are more equations than unknowns (overdetermined case) is considered. A novel approach is proposed to provide robust and accurate estimates of the solution of the linear equations when both the measurement vector and the coefficient matrix are subject to uncertainty. A new analytic formulation is developed in terms of the gradient flow to analyze and provide estimates to the solution. The presented analysis enables us to study and compare existing methods in literature. We derive theoretical bounds for the performance of our estimator and show that if the signal-to-noise ratio is low than a treshold, a significant improvement is made compared to the conventional estimator. Numerical results in applications such as blind identification, multiple frequency estimation and deconvolution show that the proposed technique outperforms alternative methods in mean-squared error for a significant range of signal-to-noise ratio values. The second type of uncertainty analyzed in the overdetermined case is where uncertainty is sparse in some basis. We show that this type of uncertainty on the coefficient matrix can be recovered exactly for a large class of structures, if we have sufficiently many equations. We propose and solve an optimization