  Given the superposition of a low-rank matrix plus the product of a known fat
compression matrix times a sparse matrix, the goal of this paper is to
establish deterministic conditions under which exact recovery of the low-rank
and sparse components becomes possible. This fundamental identifiability issue
arises with traffic anomaly detection in backbone networks, and subsumes
compressed sensing as well as the timely low-rank plus sparse matrix recovery
tasks encountered in matrix decomposition problems. Leveraging the ability of
$\ell_1$- and nuclear norms to recover sparse and low-rank matrices, a convex
program is formulated to estimate the unknowns. Analysis and simulations
confirm that the said convex program can recover the unknowns for sufficiently
low-rank and sparse enough components, along with a compression matrix
possessing an isometry property when restricted to operate on sparse vectors.
When the low-rank, sparse, and compression matrices are drawn from certain
random ensembles, it is established that exact recovery is possible with high
probability. First-order algorithms are developed to solve the nonsmooth convex
optimization problem with provable iteration complexity guarantees. Insightful
tests with synthetic and real network data corroborate the effectiveness of the
novel approach in unveiling traffic anomalies across flows and time, and its
ability to outperform existing alternatives.
