Proximal Iteration for Nonlinear Adaptive Lasso

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wycoff, Nathan, Singh, Lisa O., Arab, Ali, Donato, Katharine M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wycoff, Nathan
Singh, Lisa O.
Arab, Ali
Donato, Katharine M.
author_facet Wycoff, Nathan
Singh, Lisa O.
Arab, Ali
Donato, Katharine M.
contents Augmenting a smooth cost function with an $\ell_1$ penalty allows analysts to efficiently conduct estimation and variable selection simultaneously in sophisticated models and can be efficiently implemented using proximal gradient methods. However, one drawback of the $\ell_1$ penalty is bias: nonzero parameters are underestimated in magnitude, motivating techniques such as the Adaptive Lasso which endow each parameter with its own penalty coefficient. But it's not clear how these parameter-specific penalties should be set in complex models. In this article, we study the approach of treating the penalty coefficients as additional decision variables to be learned in a \textit{Maximum a Posteriori} manner, developing a proximal gradient approach to joint optimization of these together with the parameters of any differentiable cost function. Beyond reducing bias in estimates, this procedure can also encourage arbitrary sparsity structure via a prior on the penalty coefficients. We compare our method to implementations of specific sparsity structures for non-Gaussian regression on synthetic and real datasets, finding our more general method to be competitive in terms of both speed and accuracy. We then consider nonlinear models for two case studies: COVID-19 vaccination behavior and international refugee movement, highlighting the applicability of this approach to complex problems and intricate sparsity structures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_05726
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Proximal Iteration for Nonlinear Adaptive Lasso
Wycoff, Nathan
Singh, Lisa O.
Arab, Ali
Donato, Katharine M.
Machine Learning
Augmenting a smooth cost function with an $\ell_1$ penalty allows analysts to efficiently conduct estimation and variable selection simultaneously in sophisticated models and can be efficiently implemented using proximal gradient methods. However, one drawback of the $\ell_1$ penalty is bias: nonzero parameters are underestimated in magnitude, motivating techniques such as the Adaptive Lasso which endow each parameter with its own penalty coefficient. But it's not clear how these parameter-specific penalties should be set in complex models. In this article, we study the approach of treating the penalty coefficients as additional decision variables to be learned in a \textit{Maximum a Posteriori} manner, developing a proximal gradient approach to joint optimization of these together with the parameters of any differentiable cost function. Beyond reducing bias in estimates, this procedure can also encourage arbitrary sparsity structure via a prior on the penalty coefficients. We compare our method to implementations of specific sparsity structures for non-Gaussian regression on synthetic and real datasets, finding our more general method to be competitive in terms of both speed and accuracy. We then consider nonlinear models for two case studies: COVID-19 vaccination behavior and international refugee movement, highlighting the applicability of this approach to complex problems and intricate sparsity structures.
title Proximal Iteration for Nonlinear Adaptive Lasso
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05726