Stability and robustness of `1-minimizations with Weibull matrices and redundant dictionaries

Abstract We investigate the recovery of almost s-sparse vectors x ∈ C from undersampled and inaccurate data y = Ax + e ∈ C by means of minimizing ‖z‖1 subject to the equality constraints Az = y. If m s ln(N/s) and if Gaussian random matrices A ∈ Rm×N are used, this equality-constrained `1-minimization is known to be stable with respect to sparsity defects and robust with respect to measurement errors. If m s ln(N/s) and if Weibull random matrices are used, we prove here that the equality-constrained `1-minimization remains stable and robust. The arguments are based on two key ingredients, namely the robust null space property and the quotient property. The robust null space property relies on a variant of the classical restricted isometry property where the inner norm is replaced by the `1-norm and the outer norm is replaced by a norm comparable to the `2-norm. For the `1-minimization subject to inequality constraints, this yields stability and robustness results that are also valid when considering sparsity relative to a redundant dictionary. As for the quotient property, it relies on lower estimates for the tail probability of sums of independent Weibull random variables.