Optimization with Sparsity-Inducing Penalties

Sparse estimation methods are aimed at using or obtaining parsimonious representations of data or models. They were first dedicated to linear variable selection but numerous extensions have now emerged such as structured sparsity or kernel selection. It turns out that many of the related estimation problems can be cast as convex optimization problems by regularizing the empirical risk with appropriate non-smooth norms. The goal of this paper is to present from a general perspective optimization tools and techniques dedicated to such sparsity-inducing penalties. We cover proximal methods, block-coordinate descent, reweighted $\ell_2$-penalized techniques, working-set and homotopy methods, as well as non-convex formulations and extensions, and provide an extensive set of experiments to compare various algorithms from a computational point of view

A PAUC-based Estimation Technique for Disease Classification and Biomarker Selection.

The partial area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (PAUC) is a well-established performance measure to evaluate biomarker combinations for disease classification. Because the PAUC is defined as the area under the ROC curve within a restricted interval of false positive rates, it enables practitioners to quantify sensitivity rates within pre-specified specificity ranges. This issue is of considerable importance for the development of medical screening tests. Although many authors have highlighted the importance of PAUC, there exist only few methods that use the PAUC as an objective function for finding optimal combinations of biomarkers. In this paper, we introduce a boosting method for deriving marker combinations that is explicitly based on the PAUC criterion. The proposed method can be applied in high-dimensional settings where the number of biomarkers exceeds the number of observations. Additionally, the proposed method incorporates a recently proposed variable selection technique (stability selection) that results in sparse prediction rules incorporating only those biomarkers that make relevant contributions to predicting the outcome of interest. Using both simulated data and real data, we demonstrate that our method performs well with respect to both variable selection and prediction accuracy. Specifically, if the focus is on a limited range of specificity values, the new method results in better predictions than other established techniques for disease classification

A Dual Active-Set Algorithm for Regularized Monotonic Regression

Monotonic (isotonic) regression is a powerful tool used for solving a wide range of important applied problems. One of its features, which poses a limitation on its use in some areas, is that it produces a piecewise constant fitted response. For smoothing the fitted response, we introduce a regularization term in the monotonic regression, formulated as a least distance problem with monotonicity constraints. The resulting smoothed monotonic regression is a convex quadratic optimization problem. We focus on the case, where the set of observations is completely (linearly) ordered. Our smoothed pool-adjacent-violators algorithm is designed for solving the regularized problem. It belongs to the class of dual active-set algorithms. We prove that it converges to the optimal solution in a finite number of iterations that does not exceed the problem size. One of its advantages is that the active set is progressively enlarging by including one or, typically, more constraints per iteration. This resulted in solving large-scale test problems in a few iterations, whereas the size of that problems was prohibitively too large for the conventional quadratic optimization solvers. Although the complexity of our algorithm grows quadratically with the problem size, we found its running time to grow almost linearly in our computational experiments

Selection of Ordinally Scaled Independent Variables

Ordinal categorial variables are a common case in regression modeling. Although the case of ordinal response variables has been well investigated, less work has been done concerning ordinal predictors. This article deals with the selection of ordinally scaled independent variables in the classical linear model, where the ordinal structure is taken into account by use of a difference penalty on adjacent dummy coefficients. It is shown how the Group Lasso can be used for the selection of ordinal predictors, and an alternative blockwise Boosting procedure is proposed. Emphasis is placed on the application of the presented methods to the (Comprehensive) ICF Core Set for chronic widespread pain. The paper is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C (Applied Statistics). Please use the journal version for citation