A Field-Theoretic View of Unlabeled Sensing

Abstract

Unlabeled sensing is the problem of solving a linear system of equations, where the right-hand-side vector is known only up to a permutation. In this work, we study fields of rational functions related to symmetric polynomials and their images under a linear projection of the variables; as a consequence, we establish that the solution to an n-dimensional unlabeled sensing problem with generic data can be obtained as the unique solution to a system of n + 1 polynomial equations of degrees 1, 2, . . . , n + 1 in n unknowns. Besides the new theoretical insights, this development offers the potential for scaling up algebraic unlabeled sensing algorithms.