  The computational cost of many signal processing and machine learning
techniques is often dominated by the cost of applying certain linear operators
to high-dimensional vectors. This paper introduces an algorithm aimed at
reducing the complexity of applying linear operators in high dimension by
approximately factorizing the corresponding matrix into few sparse factors. The
approach relies on recent advances in non-convex optimization. It is first
explained and analyzed in details and then demonstrated experimentally on
various problems including dictionary learning for image denoising, and the
approximation of large matrices arising in inverse problems.
