We develop a highly scalable optimization method called "hierarchical group-thresholding" for solving a multi-task regression model with complex structured sparsity constraints on both input and output spaces. Despite the recent emergence of several efficient optimization algorithms for tackling complex sparsity-inducing regularizers, true scalability in practical high-dimensional problems where a huge amount (e.g., millions) of sparsity patterns need to be enforced remains an open challenge, because all existing algorithms must deal with ALL such patterns exhaustively in every iteration, which is computationally prohibitive. Our proposed algorithm addresses the scalability problem by screening out multiple groups of coefficients simultaneously and systematically. We employ a hierarchical tree representation of group constraints to accelerate the process of removing irrelevant constraints by taking advantage of the inclusion relationships between group sparsities, thereby avoiding dealing with all constraints in every optimization step, and necessitating optimization operation only on a small number of outstanding coefficients. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of our method on simulation datasets, and in an application of detecting genetic variants associated with gene expression traits.
In this paper, we provide a Banach-space formulation of supervised learning with generalized total-variation (gTV) regularization. We identify the class of kernel functions that are admissible in this framework. Then, we propose a variation of supervised learning in a continuous-domain hybrid search space with gTV regularization. We show that the solution admits a multi-kernel expansion with adaptive positions. In this representation, the number of active kernels is upper-bounded by the number of data points while the gTV regularization imposes an $\ell_1$ penalty on the kernel coefficients. F…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）
Decentralized sparsity learning has attracted a significant amount of attention recently due to its rapidly growing applications. To obtain the robust and sparse estimators, a natural idea is to adopt the non-smooth median loss combined with a $\ell_1$ sparsity regularizer. However, most of the existing methods suffer from slow convergence performance caused by the {\em double} non-smooth objective. To accelerate the computation, in this paper, we proposed a decentralized surrogate median regression (deSMR) method for efficiently solving the decentralized sparsity learning problem. We show tha…
Classical scalar-response regression methods treat covariates as a vector and estimate a corresponding vector of regression coefficients. In medical applications, however, regressors are often in a form of multi-dimensional arrays. For example, one may be interested in using MRI imaging to identify which brain regions are associated with a health outcome. Vectorizing the two-dimensional image arrays is an unsatisfactory approach since it destroys the inherent spatial structure of the images and can be computationally challenging. We present an alternative approach - regularized matrix regressi…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
We study the implicit regularization of gradient descent towards structured sparsity via a novel neural reparameterization, which we call a diagonally grouped linear neural network. We show the following intriguing property of our reparameterization: gradient descent over the squared regression loss, without any explicit regularization, biases towards solutions with a group sparsity structure. In contrast to many existing works in understanding implicit regularization, we prove that our training trajectory cannot be simulated by mirror descent. We analyze the gradient dynamics of the correspon…
In the present work, we consider variable selection and shrinkage for the Gaussian dynamic linear regression within a Bayesian framework. In particular, we propose a novel method that allows for time-varying sparsity, based on an extension of spike-and-slab priors for dynamic models. This is done by assigning appropriate Markov switching priors for the time-varying coefficients' variances, extending the previous work of Ishwaran and Rao (2005). Furthermore, we investigate different priors, including the common Inverted gamma prior for the process variances, and other mixture prior distribution…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
In this paper, the estimation problem for sparse reduced rank regression (SRRR) model is considered. The SRRR model is widely used for dimension reduction and variable selection with applications in signal processing, econometrics, etc. The problem is formulated to minimize the least squares loss with a sparsity-inducing penalty considering an orthogonality constraint. Convex sparsity-inducing functions have been used for SRRR in literature. In this work, a nonconvex function is proposed for better sparsity inducing. An efficient algorithm is developed based on the alternating minimization (or…
Scalable algorithms to solve optimization and regression tasks even approximately, are needed to work with large datasets. In this paper we study efficient techniques from matrix sketching to solve a variety of convex constrained regression problems. We adopt "Iterative Hessian Sketching" (IHS) and show that the fast CountSketch and sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transforms yield state-of-the-art accuracy guarantees under IHS, while drastically improving the time cost. As a result, we obtain significantly faster algorithms for constrained regression, for both sparse and dense inputs. Our empiric…
Dual-sPLS: a family of Dual Sparse Partial Least Squares regressions for feature selection and prediction with tunable sparsity; evaluation on simulated and near-infrared (NIR) data
Université Saint-Joseph（圣约瑟夫大学）；Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；IFP Energies nouvelles（法国石油与新能源研究院）
Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；Instituto Superior Técnico（高等技术学院）
我们提出了一种新的稀疏性和聚类（SPARsity and Clustering，简称SPARMN）正则化器，它是对以前的八角形收缩和聚类回归算法（OSCAR）的改进，其中，所提出的正则化器由$K$稀疏约束和限制在$K$最大分量上的成对$\ell_{\infty}$范数组成。所提出的正则化是能够单独执行$K$ -稀疏性，并鼓励非零是相等的幅度。此外，它可以准确地对特征进行分组，而不会缩小它们的大小。事实上，OSCAR与OSCAR密切相关，因此前者的邻近算子可以基于后者的邻近算子有效地计算，从而允许使用邻近分裂算法来解决OSCAR正则化问题。在合成数据和基准乳腺癌数据上的实验表明，该方法是一种具有竞争力的群体稀疏诱导正则化回归和分类。
We consider high-dimensional multiclass classification by sparse multinomial logistic regression. Unlike binary classification, in the multiclass setup one can think about an entire spectrum of possible notions of sparsity associated with different structural assumptions on the regression coefficients matrix. We propose a computationally feasible feature selection procedure based on penalized maximum likelihood with convex penalties capturing a specific type of sparsity at hand. In particular, we consider global sparsity, double row-wise sparsity, and low-rank sparsity, and show that with the …
School of Statistics and Data Science, Qufu Normal University（统计与数据科学学院，曲阜师范大学）；Dongfang College, ShanDong University of Finance and Economics（东方学院，山东财经大学）
Kernel logistic regression (KLR) is a powerful classification method widely applied across diverse domains. In many real-world scenarios, indefinite kernels capture more domain-specific structural information than positive definite kernels. This paper proposes a novel $L_1$-norm regularized indefinite kernel logistic regression (RIKLR) model, which extends the existing IKLR framework by introducing sparsity via an $L_1$-norm penalty. The introduction of this regularization enhances interpretability and generalization while introducing nonsmoothness and nonconvexity into the optimization landsc…
Gaussian graphical regression is a powerful means that regresses the precision matrix of a Gaussian graphical model on covariates, permitting the numbers of the response variables and covariates to far exceed the sample size. Model fitting is typically carried out via separate node-wise lasso regressions, ignoring the network-induced structure among these regressions. Consequently, the error rate is high, especially when the number of nodes is large. We propose a multi-task learning estimator for fitting Gaussian graphical regression models; we design a cross-task group sparsity penalty and a …
In high dimensional regression settings, sparsity enforcing penalties have proved useful to regularize the data-fitting term. A recently introduced technique called screening rules propose to ignore some variables in the optimization leveraging the expected sparsity of the solutions and consequently leading to faster solvers. When the procedure is guaranteed not to discard variables wrongly the rules are said to be safe. In this work, we propose a unifying framework for generalized linear models regularized with standard sparsity enforcing penalties such as $\ell_1$ or $\ell_1/\ell_2$ norms. O…
Predictive models can be used on high-dimensional brain images for diagnosis of a clinical condition. Spatial regularization through structured sparsity offers new perspectives in this context and reduces the risk of overfitting the model while providing interpretable neuroimaging signatures by forcing the solution to adhere to domain-specific constraints. Total Variation (TV) enforces spatial smoothness of the solution while segmenting predictive regions from the background. We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth convex loss, a non-smooth convex penalty (whose proximal oper…
In this paper, we introduce structured sparsity estimators in Generalized Linear Models. Structured sparsity estimators in the least squares loss are introduced by Stucky and van de Geer (2018) recently for fixed design and normal errors. We extend their results to debiased structured sparsity estimators with Generalized Linear Model based loss. Structured sparsity estimation means penalized loss functions with a possible sparsity structure used in the chosen norm. These include weighted group lasso, lasso and norms generated from convex cones. The significant difficulty is that it is not clea…
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院）；HEC Paris（巴黎高等商学院）；Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院运筹学中心）；Technology and Operations Management Unit, Harvard Business School（哈佛商学院技术与运营管理系）；McKinsey & Company（麦肯锡公司）
This paper extends the idea of decoupling shrinkage and sparsity for continuous priors to Bayesian Quantile Regression (BQR). The procedure follows two steps: In the first step, we shrink the quantile regression posterior through state of the art continuous priors and in the second step, we sparsify the posterior through an efficient variant of the adaptive lasso, the signal adaptive variable selection (SAVS) algorithm. We propose a new variant of the SAVS which automates the choice of penalisation through quantile specific loss-functions that are valid in high dimensions. We show in large sca…
Understanding statistical inference under possibly non-sparse high-dimensional models has gained much interest recently. For a given component of the regression coefficient, we show that the difficulty of the problem depends on the sparsity of the corresponding row of the precision matrix of the covariates, not the sparsity of the regression coefficients. We develop new concepts of uniform and essentially uniform non-testability that allow the study of limitations of tests across a broad set of alternatives. Uniform non-testability identifies a collection of alternatives such that the power of…
We propose an algebraic combinatorial method for solving large sparse linear systems of equations locally - that is, a method which can compute single evaluations of the signal without computing the whole signal. The method scales only in the sparsity of the system and not in its size, and allows to provide error estimates for any solution method. At the heart of our approach is the so-called regression matroid, a combinatorial object associated to sparsity patterns, which allows to replace inversion of the large matrix with the inversion of a kernel matrix that is constant size. We show that …
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
Recent theoretical studies proved that deep neural network (DNN) estimators obtained by minimizing empirical risk with a certain sparsity constraint can attain optimal convergence rates for regression and classification problems. However, the sparsity constraint requires to know certain properties of the true model, which are not available in practice. Moreover, computation is difficult due to the discrete nature of the sparsity constraint. In this paper, we propose a novel penalized estimation method for sparse DNNs, which resolves the aforementioned problems existing in the sparsity constrai…
The paper proposes chi-square and normal inference methodologies for the unknown coefficient matrix $B^*$ of size $p\times T$ in a Multi-Task (MT) linear model with $p$ covariates, $T$ tasks and $n$ observations under a row-sparse assumption on $B^*$. The row-sparsity $s$, dimension $p$ and number of tasks $T$ are allowed to grow with $n$. In the high-dimensional regime $p\ggg n$, in order to leverage row-sparsity, the MT Lasso is considered. We build upon the MT Lasso with a de-biasing scheme to correct for the bias induced by the penalty. This scheme requires the introduction of a new data-d…
Graphs have been commonly used to represent complex data structures. In models dealing with graph-structured data, multivariate parameters may not only exhibit sparse patterns but have structured sparsity and smoothness in the sense that both zero and non-zero parameters tend to cluster together. We propose a new prior for high-dimensional parameters with graphical relations, referred to as the Tree-based Low-rank Horseshoe (T-LoHo) model, that generalizes the popular univariate Bayesian horseshoe shrinkage prior to the multivariate setting to detect structured sparsity and smoothness simultan…
Northeast Normal University（东北师范大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
In the total least squares problem, one is given an $m \times n$ matrix $A$, and an $m \times d$ matrix $B$, and one seeks to "correct" both $A$ and $B$, obtaining matrices $\hat{A}$ and $\hat{B}$, so that there exists an $X$ satisfying the equation $\hat{A}X = \hat{B}$. Typically the problem is overconstrained, meaning that $m \gg \max(n,d)$. The cost of the solution $\hat{A}, \hat{B}$ is given by $\|A-\hat{A}\|_F^2 + \|B - \hat{B}\|_F^2$. We give an algorithm for finding a solution $X$ to the linear system $\hat{A}X=\hat{B}$ for which the cost $\|A-\hat{A}\|_F^2 + \|B-\hat{B}\|_F^2$ is at mo…
