10,256 research outputs found
Minimax Structured Normal Means Inference
We provide a unified treatment of a broad class of noisy structure recovery
problems, known as structured normal means problems. In this setting, the goal
is to identify, from a finite collection of Gaussian distributions with
different means, the distribution that produced some observed data. Recent work
has studied several special cases including sparse vectors, biclusters, and
graph-based structures. We establish nearly matching upper and lower bounds on
the minimax probability of error for any structured normal means problem, and
we derive an optimality certificate for the maximum likelihood estimator, which
can be applied to many instantiations. We also consider an experimental design
setting, where we generalize our minimax bounds and derive an algorithm for
computing a design strategy with a certain optimality property. We show that
our results give tight minimax bounds for many structure recovery problems and
consider some consequences for interactive sampling
Structured Sparsity: Discrete and Convex approaches
Compressive sensing (CS) exploits sparsity to recover sparse or compressible
signals from dimensionality reducing, non-adaptive sensing mechanisms. Sparsity
is also used to enhance interpretability in machine learning and statistics
applications: While the ambient dimension is vast in modern data analysis
problems, the relevant information therein typically resides in a much lower
dimensional space. However, many solutions proposed nowadays do not leverage
the true underlying structure. Recent results in CS extend the simple sparsity
idea to more sophisticated {\em structured} sparsity models, which describe the
interdependency between the nonzero components of a signal, allowing to
increase the interpretability of the results and lead to better recovery
performance. In order to better understand the impact of structured sparsity,
in this chapter we analyze the connections between the discrete models and
their convex relaxations, highlighting their relative advantages. We start with
the general group sparse model and then elaborate on two important special
cases: the dispersive and the hierarchical models. For each, we present the
models in their discrete nature, discuss how to solve the ensuing discrete
problems and then describe convex relaxations. We also consider more general
structures as defined by set functions and present their convex proxies.
Further, we discuss efficient optimization solutions for structured sparsity
problems and illustrate structured sparsity in action via three applications.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figure
Tree-guided group lasso for multi-response regression with structured sparsity, with an application to eQTL mapping
We consider the problem of estimating a sparse multi-response regression
function, with an application to expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL)
mapping, where the goal is to discover genetic variations that influence
gene-expression levels. In particular, we investigate a shrinkage technique
capable of capturing a given hierarchical structure over the responses, such as
a hierarchical clustering tree with leaf nodes for responses and internal nodes
for clusters of related responses at multiple granularity, and we seek to
leverage this structure to recover covariates relevant to each
hierarchically-defined cluster of responses. We propose a tree-guided group
lasso, or tree lasso, for estimating such structured sparsity under
multi-response regression by employing a novel penalty function constructed
from the tree. We describe a systematic weighting scheme for the overlapping
groups in the tree-penalty such that each regression coefficient is penalized
in a balanced manner despite the inhomogeneous multiplicity of group
memberships of the regression coefficients due to overlaps among groups. For
efficient optimization, we employ a smoothing proximal gradient method that was
originally developed for a general class of structured-sparsity-inducing
penalties. Using simulated and yeast data sets, we demonstrate that our method
shows a superior performance in terms of both prediction errors and recovery of
true sparsity patterns, compared to other methods for learning a
multivariate-response regression.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS549 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
- …