Towards an FFT for measures

Complex measures recently became a well-established data model. We discuss the adaptation of the ubiquitous fast Fourier transform to measures, which involves their approximation by a multivariate trigonometric polynomial respecting normalization and non-negativity if applicable. The achieved approximation results, with respect to the Wasserstein-1 distance, are sharp up to logarithmic factors. The Fourier transform of atomic measures is shown to be computed up to logarithmic factors in linear time with respect to the problem size. The inverse Fourier transform is in general more involved but can be replaced by the easily computed approximation for typical applications.