Noise enhanced hypothesis-testing according to restricted Neyman-Pearson criterion

Noise enhanced hypothesis-testing is studied according to the restricted Neyman-Pearson (NP) criterion. First, a problem formulation is presented for obtaining the optimal probability distribution of additive noise in the restricted NP framework. Then, sufficient conditions for improvability and nonimprovability are derived in order to specify if additive noise can or cannot improve detection performance over scenarios in which no additive noise is employed. Also, for the special case of a finite number of possible parameter values under each hypothesis, it is shown that the optimal additive noise can be represented by a discrete random variable with a certain number of point masses. In addition, particular improvability conditions are derived for that special case. Finally, theoretical results are provided for a numerical example and improvements via additive noise are illustrated. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.