  We investigate the problem of estimating the unknown degree of sparsity from
compressive measurements without the need to carry out a sparse recovery step.
While the sparsity order can be directly inferred from the effective rank of
the observation matrix in the multiple snapshot case, this appears to be
impossible in the more challenging single snapshot case. We show that specially
designed measurement matrices allow to rearrange the measurement vector into a
matrix such that its effective rank coincides with the effective sparsity
order. In fact, we prove that matrices which are composed of a Khatri-Rao
product of smaller matrices generate measurements that allow to infer the
sparsity order. Moreover, if some samples are used more than once, one of the
matrices needs to be Vandermonde. These structural constraints reduce the
degrees of freedom in choosing the measurement matrix which may incur in a
degradation in the achievable coherence. We thus also address suitable choices
of the measurement matrices. In particular, we analyze Khatri-Rao and
Vandermonde matrices in terms of their coherence and provide a new design for
Vandermonde matrices that achieves a low coherence.
