Parallel residual projection: a new paradigm for solving linear inverse problems

A grand challenge to solve a large-scale linear inverse problem (LIP) is to retain computational efficiency and accuracy regardless of the growth of the problem size. Despite the plenitude of methods available for solving LIPs, various challenges have emerged in recent times due to the sheer volume of data, inadequate computational resources to handle an oversized problem, security and privacy concerns, and the interest in the associated incremental or decremental problems. Removing these barriers requires a holistic upgrade of the existing methods to be computationally efficient, tractable, and equipped with scalable features. We, therefore, develop the parallel residual projection (PRP), a parallel computational framework involving the decomposition of a large-scale LIP into sub-problems of low complexity and the fusion of the sub-problem solutions to form the solution to the original LIP. We analyze the convergence properties of the PRP and accentuate its benefits through its application to complex problems of network inference and gravimetric survey. We show that any existing algorithm for solving an LIP can be integrated into the PRP framework and used to solve the sub-problems while handling the prevailing challenges.