Nested Periodic Matrices and Dictionaries: New Signal Representations for Period Estimation

In this paper, we propose a new class of techniques to identify periodicities in data. We target the period estimation directly rather than inferring the period from the signal's spectrum. By doing so, we obtain several advantages over the traditional spectrum estimation techniques such as DFT and MUSIC. Apart from estimating the unknown period of a signal, we search for finer periodic structure within the given signal. For instance, it might be possible that the given periodic signal was actually a sum of signals with much smaller periods. For example, adding signals with periods 3, 7, and 11 can give rise to a period 231 signal. We propose methods to identify these "hidden periods" 3, 7, and 11. We first propose a new family of square matrices called Nested Periodic Matrices (NPMs), having several useful properties in the context of periodicity. These include the DFT, Walsh-Hadamard, and Ramanujan periodicity transform matrices as examples. Based on these matrices, we develop high dimensional dictionary representations for periodic signals. Various optimization problems can be formulated to identify the periods of signals from such representations. We propose an approach based on finding the least l(2) norm solution to an under-determined linear system. Alternatively, the period identification problem can also be formulated as a sparse vector recovery problem and we show that by a slight modification to the usual norm minimization techniques, we can incorporate a number of new and computationally simple dictionaries.