Abstract
The replica method is a non-rigorous but well-known technique from
statistical physics used in the asymptotic analysis of large, random, nonlinear
problems. This paper applies the replica method, under the assumption of
replica symmetry, to study estimators that are maximum a posteriori (MAP) under
a postulated prior distribution. It is shown that with random linear
measurements and Gaussian noise, the replica-symmetric prediction of the
asymptotic behavior of the postulated MAP estimate of an n-dimensional vector
"decouples" as n scalar postulated MAP estimators. The result is based on
applying a hardening argument to the replica analysis of postulated posterior
mean estimators of Tanaka and of Guo and Verdu.
The replica-symmetric postulated 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. In the case
of lasso estimation the scalar estimator reduces to a soft-thresholding
operator, and for zero norm-regularized estimation it reduces to a
hard-threshold. Among other benefits, the replica method provides a
computationally-tractable method for precisely predicting various performance
metrics including mean-squared error and sparsity pattern recovery probability.
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