Extension of replica analysis to MAP estimation with applications to compressed sensing

The replica method is a non-rigorous but widely-accepted technique from statistical physics used in the asymptotic analysis of large, random, nonlinear problems. This paper applies the replica method to analyze non-Gaussian maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. The main result is a counterpart to Guo and Verdú's replica analysis of minimum mean-squared error estimation. The replica MAP analysis can be readily applied to many estimators used in compressed sensing, including basis pursuit, lasso, linear estimation with thresholding, and zero norm-regularized estimation. Among other benefits, the replica method provides a computationally-tractable method for exactly computing various performance metrics including mean-squared error and sparsity pattern recovery probability.