An adaptive convex combination of APA and ZA-APA for identifying systems having variable sparsity and correlated input

In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for identifying and tracking the impulse response of a sparse system that exhibits time varying sparseness and is driven by correlated input. The proposed method convexly combines the outputs of two filters, namely, the sparsity unaware affine projection algorithm (APA), and the sparsity aware zero attracting affine projection algorithm (ZA-APA), each trying to identify the same system using the same input. The combining parameter is adapted by following a steepest descent of the error variance at the convex combination output. A detailed performance analysis of the proposed combination is carried out, which reveals that while for highly non-sparse and highly sparse systems, the proposed combination converges respectively to the APA and ZA-APA (i.e., better of the two filters under the given levels of sparsity), for certain sparsity ranges, it leads to a combination filter that performs better than both the constituent filters. The claims made are validated by exhaustive simulation studies using white, colored as well as speech inputs.