1 Beurling-Type Density Criteria for System Identification Verner Vlaˇci´c∗, C´eline Aubel†, and Helmut B¨olcskei∗ ∗ETH Zurich, Switzerland †Swiss National Bank, Zurich, Switzerland Email: ∗
[email protected], †
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[email protected] Abstract This paper addresses the problem of identifying a linear time-varying (LTV) system characterized by a (possibly infinite) discrete set of delay-Doppler shifts without a lattice (or other “geometry- discretizing”) constraint on the support set. Concretely, we show that a class of such LTV systems is identifiable whenever the upper uniform Beurling density of the delay-Doppler support sets, measured “uniformly over the class”, is strictly less than 1/2. The proof of this result reveals an interesting relation between LTV system identification and interpolation in the Bargmann-Fock space. Moreover, we show that this density condition is also necessary for classes of systems invariant under time- frequency shifts and closed under a natural topology on the support sets. We furthermore show that identifiability guarantees robust recovery of the delay-Doppler support set, as well as the weights of the individual delay-Doppler shifts, both in the sense of asymptotically vanishing reconstruction error for vanishing measurement error. I. INTRODUCTION Identification of deterministic linear time-varying (LTV) systems has been a topic of long-standing interest, dating back to the seminal work by Kailath [1] and Bello [2], and has seen significant renewed interest during the past decade [3]–[6]. This general problem occurs in many fields of engineering and science. Concrete examples include system identification in control theory and practice, the measurement of dispersive communication channels, and radar imaging.