A heuristic procedure based on novel recursive formulation of sinusoid (RFS) and on regression with predictive least-squares (LS) enables to decompose both uniformly and nonuniformly sampled 1-d signals into a sparse set of sinusoids (SSS). An optimal SSS is found by Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) optimization of RFS parameters of near-optimal sinusoids combined with common criteria for the estimation of the number of sinusoids embedded in noise. The procedure estimates both the cardinality and the parameters of SSS. The proposed algorithm enables to identify the RFS parameters of a sinusoid from a data sequence containing only a fraction of its cycle. In extreme cases when the frequency of a sinusoid approaches zero the algorithm is able to detect a linear trend in data. Also, an irregular sampling pattern enables the algorithm to correctly reconstruct the under-sampled sinusoid. Parsimonious nature of the obtaining models opens the possibilities of using the proposed method in machine learning and in expert and intelligent systems needing analysis and simple representation of 1-d signals. The properties of the proposed algorithm are evaluated on examples of irregularly sampled artificial signals in noise and are compared with high accuracy frequency estimation algorithms based on linear prediction (LP) approach, particularly with respect to Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB). (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.