Imusic: A Family of MUSIC-Like Algorithms for Integer Period Estimation

The MUSIC algorithm is one of the most popular techniques today for line spectral estimation. If the line spectrum is that of a periodic signal, can we adapt MUSIC to exploit the additional harmonicity in the spectrum? Important prior work in this direction includes the Harmonic MUSIC algorithm and its variations. For applications where the period of the discrete signal is an integer (or can be well approximated by an integer), this paper introduces a new and simpler class of alternatives to MUSIC. This new family, called iMUSIC, also includes techniques where simple integer valued vectors are used in place of complex exponentials for both representing the signal subspace, and for computing the pseudo-spectrum. It will be shown that the proposed methods not only make the computations much simpler than prior periodicity-adaptations of MUSIC, but also offer significantly better estimation accuracies for applications with integer periods. These advantages are demonstrated on examples that include repeats in protein and DNA sequences. The iMUSIC algorithms are based on the recently proposed Ramanujan subspaces and nested periodic subspaces. The resulting signal space bases are non-Vandermonde in structure. Consequently, many aspects of classical MUSIC that were based on the Vandermonde structure of complex-exponentials, such as guarantees for identifiability of the frequencies (periods in our case), are addressed in new ways in this paper.