Background There has been a recent interest in adaptive algorithms to handle sparsity in various signals and systems (Gu et al. 2009; Chen et al. 2009; Babadi et al. 2010; Angelosante et al. 2010; Eksioglu 2011; Eksioglu and Tanc 2011; Kalouptsidis et al. 2011). The idea is to exploit a priori knowledge about sparsity in a signal that needs to be processed for system identification. Several alg...