Variational Seasonal-Trend Decomposition with Sparse Continuous-Domain Regularization

Abstract

We consider the inverse problem of recovering a continuous-domain function from a finite number of noisy linear measurements. The unknown signal is modeled as the sum of a slowly varying trend and a periodic or quasi-periodic seasonal component. We formulate a variational framework for their joint recovery by introducing convex regularizations based on generalized total variation, which promote sparsity in spline-like representations. Our analysis is conducted in an infinite-dimensional setting and leads to a representer theorem showing that minimizers are splines in both components. To make the approach numerically feasible, we introduce a family of discrete approximations and prove their convergence to the original problem in the sense of $\Gamma$-convergence. This further ensures the uniform convergence of discrete solutions to their continuous counterparts. The proposed framework offers a principled approach to seasonal-trend decomposition in the presence of noise and limited measurements, with theoretical guarantees on both representation and discretization.