Compressive System Identification in the Linear Time-Invariant framework

Selection of an efficient model parametrization (model order, delay, etc.) has crucial importance in parametric system identification. It navigates a trade-off between representation capabilities of the model (structural bias) and effects of over-parametrization (variance increase of the estimates). There exists many approaches to this widely studied problem in terms of statistical regularization methods and information criteria. In this paper, an alternative ℓ₁ regularization scheme is proposed for estimation of sparse linear-regression models based on recent results in compressive sensing. It is shown that the proposed scheme provides consistent estimation of sparse models in terms of the so-called oracle property, it is computationally attractive for large-scale over-parameterized models and it is applicable in case of small data sets, i.e., underdetermined estimation problems. The performance of the approach w.r.t. other regularization schemes is demonstrated in an extensive Monte Carlo study.