Asymptotic Mean-Square Optimality of Belief Propagation for Sparse Linear Systems

This paper studies the estimation of a high-dimensional vector signal where the observation is a known "sparse" linear transformation of the signal corrupted by additive Gaussian noise. A paradigm of such a linear system is code-division multiple access (CDMA) channel with sparse spreading matrix. Assuming a "semi-regular" ensemble of sparse matrix linear transformations, where the bi-partite graph describing the system is asymptotically cycle-free, it is shown that belief propagation (BP) achieves the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) in estimating the transformation of the input vector in the large-system limit. The result holds regardless of the the distribution and power of the input symbols. Furthermore, the mean squared error of estimating each symbol of the input vector using BP is proved to be equal to the MMSE of estimating the same symbol through a scalar Gaussian channel with some degradation in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The degradation, called the efficiency, is determined from a fixed-point equation due to Guo and Verdu, which is a generalization of Tanaka's formula to arbitrary prior distributions