Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to wireless communications. In some aspects, a wireless device reduces a peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of a discrete-time orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission by selecting a signal with low PAPR from a set of candidate discrete-time OFDM signals. The wireless device may generate a partial-update discrete-time OFDM signal by performing a sparse transform operation on a base data symbol sequence, and then linearly combine the partial-update discrete-time OFDM signal with a base discrete-time OFDM signal to produce an updated discrete-time OFDM signal, which is added to the set of candidate discrete-time OFDM signals. Numerous other aspects are provided.