First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This paper presented a new method for spike-sorting, although the method itself is general and not limited to spike-sorting, and was presented in a generic way. The authors introduced two new ideas. First is to use SVD to define basis functions and compute precise spike times by interpolation, which is I think a very neat idea. To this end, Taylor or polar interpolators are previously used (Ekanadham et al., 2011), but the authors pointed out that SVD-based method is theoretically optimal in MSE sense.

Many signals, such as spike trains recorded in multi-channel electrophysiological recordings, may be represented as the sparse sum of translated and scaled copies of waveforms whose timing and amplitudes are of interest. From the aggregate signal, one may seek to estimate the identities, amplitudes, and translations of the waveforms that compose the signal. Here we present a fast method for recovering these identities, amplitudes, and translations. The method involves greedily selecting component waveforms and then refining estimates of their amplitudes and translations, moving iteratively between these steps in a process analogous to the well-known Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm. Our approach for modeling translations borrows from Continuous Basis Pursuit (CBP), which we extend in several ways: by selecting a subspace that optimally captures translated copies of the waveforms, replacing the convex optimization problem with a greedy approach, and moving to the Fourier domain to more precisely estimate time shifts. We test the resulting method, which we call Continuous Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (COMP), on simulated and neural data, where it shows gains over CBP in both speed and accuracy.

Many signals, such as spike trains recorded in multi-channel electrophysiological recordings, may be represented as the sparse sum of translated and scaled copies of waveforms whose timing and amplitudes are of interest. From the aggregate signal, one may seek to estimate the identities, amplitudes, and translations of the waveforms that compose the signal. Here we present a fast method for recovering these identities, amplitudes, and translations. The method involves greedily selecting component waveforms and then refining estimates of their amplitudes and translations, moving iteratively between these steps in a process analogous to the well-known Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm. Our approach for modeling translations borrows from Continuous Basis Pursuit (CBP), which we extend in several ways: by selecting a subspace that optimally captures translated copies of the waveforms, replacing the convex optimization problem with a greedy approach, and moving to the Fourier domain to more precisely estimate time shifts.

Many signals, such as spike trains recorded in multi-channel electrophysiological recordings, may be represented as the sparse sum of translated and scaled copies of waveforms whose timing and amplitudes are of interest. From the aggregate signal, one may seek to estimate the identities, amplitudes, and translations of the waveforms that compose the signal. Here we present a fast method for recovering these identities, amplitudes, and translations. The method involves greedily selecting component waveforms and then refining estimates of their amplitudes and translations, moving iteratively between these steps in a process analogous to the well-known Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm. Our approach for modeling translations borrows from Continuous Basis Pursuit (CBP), which we extend in several ways: by selecting a subspace that optimally captures translated copies of the waveforms, replacing the convex optimization problem with a greedy approach, and moving to the Fourier domain to more precisely estimate time shifts.