Prony Method for Two-Generator Sparse Expansion Problem

Abstract

In data analysis and signal processing, the recovery of structured functions from the given sampling values is a fundamental problem. Many methods generalized from the Prony method have been developed to solve this problem; however, the current research mainly deals with the functions represented in sparse expansions using a single generating function. In this paper, we generalize the Prony method to solve the sparse expansion problem for two generating functions, so that more types of functions can be recovered by Prony-type methods. The two-generator sparse expansion problem has some special properties. For example, the two sets of frequencies need to be separated from the zeros of the Prony polynomial. We propose a two-stage least-square detection method to solve this problem effectively.