Information-Theoretic Limits on Sparsity Recovery in the High-Dimensional and Noisy Setting

The problem of sparsity pattern or support set recovery refers to estimating the set of nonzero coefficients of an unknown vector beta* isin Ropf
^p
based on a set of n noisy observations. It arises in a variety of settings, including subset selection in regression, graphical model selection, signal denoising, compressive sensing, and constructive approximation. The sample complexity of a given method for subset recovery refers to the scaling of the required sample size n as a function of the signal dimension p, sparsity index k (number of non-zeroes in beta*), as well as the minimum value beta
_min
of beta* over its support and other parameters of measurement matrix. This paper studies the information-theoretic limits of sparsity recovery: in particular, for a noisy linear observation model based on random measurement matrices drawn from general Gaussian measurement matrices, we derive both a set of sufficient conditions for exact support recovery using an exhaustive search decoder, as well as a set of necessary conditions that any decoder, regardless of its computational complexity, must satisfy for exact support recovery. This analysis of fundamental limits complements our previous work on sharp thresholds for support set recovery over the same set of random measurement ensembles using the polynomial-time Lasso method (lscr
₁
-constrained quadratic programming).