Simple Codes and Sparse Recovery with Fast Decoding
share
Construction of error-correcting codes achieving a designated minimum distance parameter is a central problem in coding theory. A classical and algebraic family of error-correcting codes studied for this purpose are the BCH codes. In this work, we study a very simple construction of linear codes that achieve a given distance parameter K. Moreover, we design a simple syndrome decoder for the code as well. The running time of the decoder is only logarithmic in the block length of the code, and nearly linear in the distance parameter K. Furthermore, computation of the syndrome from a received word can be done in nearly linear time in the block length. The techniques can also be used in sparse recovery applications to enable sublinear time recovery. We demonstrate this for the particular application of non-adaptive group testing problem, and construct simple explicit measurement schemes with O(K^2 ^2 N) tests and O(K^3 ^2 N) recovery time for identifying up to K defectives in a population of size N.
READ FULL TEXT