  A popular approach within the signal processing and machine learning
communities consists in modelling signals as sparse linear combinations of
atoms selected from a learned dictionary. While this paradigm has led to
numerous empirical successes in various fields ranging from image to audio
processing, there have only been a few theoretical arguments supporting these
evidences. In particular, sparse coding, or sparse dictionary learning, relies
on a non-convex procedure whose local minima have not been fully analyzed yet.
In this paper, we consider a probabilistic model of sparse signals, and show
that, with high probability, sparse coding admits a local minimum around the
reference dictionary generating the signals. Our study takes into account the
case of over-complete dictionaries, noisy signals, and possible outliers, thus
extending previous work limited to noiseless settings and/or under-complete
dictionaries. The analysis we conduct is non-asymptotic and makes it possible
to understand how the key quantities of the problem, such as the coherence or
the level of noise, can scale with respect to the dimension of the signals, the
number of atoms, the sparsity and the number of observations.
