  Compressed sensing deals with efficient recovery of analog signals from
linear encodings. This paper presents a statistical study of compressed sensing
by modeling the input signal as an i.i.d. process with known distribution.
Three classes of encoders are considered, namely optimal nonlinear, optimal
linear and random linear encoders. Focusing on optimal decoders, we investigate
the fundamental tradeoff between measurement rate and reconstruction fidelity
gauged by error probability and noise sensitivity in the absence and presence
of measurement noise, respectively. The optimal phase transition threshold is
determined as a functional of the input distribution and compared to suboptimal
thresholds achieved by popular reconstruction algorithms. In particular, we
show that Gaussian sensing matrices incur no penalty on the phase transition
threshold with respect to optimal nonlinear encoding. Our results also provide
a rigorous justification of previous results based on replica heuristics in the
weak-noise regime.
