Abstract-Sparse superposition codes were recently introduced by Barron and Joseph for reliable communication over the AWGN channel at rates approaching the channel capacity. The codebook is defined in terms of a Gaussian design matrix, and codewords are sparse linear combinations of columns of the matrix. In this paper, we propose an approximate message passing decoder for sparse superposition codes, whose decoding complexity scales linearly with the size of the design matrix. The performance of the decoder is rigorously analyzed and it is shown to asymptotically achieve the AWGN capacity with an appropriate power allocation. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the decoder at finite blocklengths. We introduce a power allocation scheme to improve the empirical performance, and demonstrate how the decoding complexity can be significantly reduced by using Hadamard design matrices.

Approximate message passing (AMP) refers to a class of efficient algorithms for statistical estimation in highdimensional problems such as compressed sensing and low-rank matrix estimation. This paper analyzes the performance of AMP in the regime where the problem dimension is large but finite. For concreteness, we consider the setting of high-dimensional regression, where the goal is to estimate a high-dimensional vector β0 from a noisy measurement y = Aβ0 + w. AMP is a low-complexity, scalable algorithm for this problem. Under suitable assumptions on the measurement matrix A, AMP has the attractive feature that its performance can be accurately characterized in the large system limit by a simple scalar iteration called state evolution. Previous proofs of the validity of state evolution have all been asymptotic convergence results. In this paper, we derive a concentration inequality for AMP with i.i.d. Gaussian measurement matrices with finite size n×N . The result shows that the probability of deviation from the state evolution prediction falls exponentially in n. This provides theoretical support for empirical findings that have demonstrated excellent agreement of AMP performance with state evolution predictions for moderately large dimensions. The concentration inequality also indicates that the number of AMP iterations t can grow no faster than order log n log log n for the performance to be close to the state evolution predictions with high probability. The analysis can be extended to obtain similar non-asymptotic results for AMP in other settings such as low-rank matrix estimation.

Approximate message passing (AMP) refers to a class of efficient algorithms for statistical estimation in high-dimensional problems such as compressed sensing and low-rank matrix estimation. This paper analyzes the performance of AMP in the regime where the problem dimension is large but finite. For concreteness, we consider the setting of high-dimensional regression, where the goal is to estimate a high-dimensional vector β 0 from a noisy measurement y = Aβ 0 + w. AMP is a low-complexity, scalable algorithm for this problem. Under suitable assumptions on the measurement matrix A, AMP has the attractive feature that its performance can be accurately characterized in the large system limit by a simple scalar iteration called state evolution. Previous proofs of the validity of state evolution have all been asymptotic convergence results. In this paper, we derive a concentration inequality for AMP with i.i.d. Gaussian measurement matrices with finite size n × N. The result shows that the probability of deviation from the state evolution prediction falls exponentially in n. This provides theoretical support for empirical findings that have demonstrated excellent agreement of AMP performance with state evolution predictions for moderately large dimensions. The concentration inequality also indicates that the number of AMP iterations t can grow no faster than order log n log log n for the performance to be close to the state evolution predictions with high probability. The analysis can be extended to obtain similar non-asymptotic results for AMP in other settings such as low-rank matrix estimation.

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