On the sparsity of signals in a random sample

This article proposes a method of moments technique for estimating the sparsity of signals in a random sample. This involves estimating the largest eigenvalue of a large Hermitian trigonometric matrix under mild conditions. As illustration, the method is applied to two well-known problems. The first focuses on the sparsity of a large covariance matrix and the second investigates the sparsity of a sequence of signals observed with stationary, weakly dependent noise. Simulation shows that the proposed estimators can have significantly smaller mean absolute errors than their main competitors. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.