Abstract—The problem of sparsity pattern or support set recovery refers to estimating the set of nonzero coefficients of an un-3 p known vector 2 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 3), as well as the minimum value min of 3 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 (`1-constrained quadratic programming). Index Terms—Compressed sensing, `1-relaxation, Fano’s method, high-dimensional statistical inference, information-theoretic

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We study the information-theoretic limits of exactly recovering the support of a sparse signal using noisy projections defined by various classes of measurement matrices. Our analysis is high-dimensional in nature, in which the number of observations n, the ambient signal dimension p, and the signal sparsity k are all allowed to tend to infinity in a general manner. This paper makes two novel contributions. First, we provide sharper necessary conditions for exact support recovery using general (non-Gaussian) dense measurement matrices. Combined with previously known sufficient conditions, this result yields a sharp characterization of when the optimal decoder can recover a signal with linear sparsity (k = Θ(p)) using a linear scaling of observations (n = Θ(p)) in the presence of noise. Our second contribution is to prove necessary conditions on the number of observations n required for asymptotically reliable recovery using a class of γ-sparsified measurement matrices, where the measurement sparsity γ(n, p, k) G (0, 1] corresponds to the fraction of non-zero entries per row. Our analysis allows general scaling of the quadruplet (n, p, k, γ), and reveals three different regimes, corresponding to whether measurement sparsity has no effect, a minor effect, or a dramatic effect on the information-theoretic limits of the subset recovery problem.