818 research outputs found
D-trace estimation of a precision matrix using adaptive Lasso penalties
The accurate estimation of a precision matrix plays a crucial role in the current age of high-dimensional data explosion. To deal with this problem, one of the prominent and commonly used techniques is the ℓ1 norm (Lasso) penalization for a given loss function. This approach guarantees the sparsity of the precision matrix estimate for properly selected penalty parameters. However, the ℓ1 norm penalization often fails to control the bias of obtained estimator because of its overestimation behavior. In this paper, we introduce two adaptive extensions of the recently proposed ℓ1 norm penalized D-trace loss minimization method. They aim at reducing the produced bias in the estimator. Extensive numerical results, using both simulated and real datasets, show the advantage of our proposed estimators.We would like to thank the Associate Editor, Coordinating Editor and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments that led to an improvement of this article. We express our gratitude to Teng Zhang and Hui Zou for sharing their Matlab code that solves the L1 norm penalized D-trace loss minimization problem. Andrés M. Alonso gratefully acknowledges financial support from CICYT (Spain) Grants ECO2012-38442 and ECO2015-66593. Francisco J. Nogales and Vahe Avagyan were supported by the Spanish Government through project MTM2013-44902-P. This paper is based on the first author's dissertation submitted to the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. At the time of publication, Vahe Avagyan is a Postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University
Adaptive estimation of covariance matrices via Cholesky decomposition
This paper studies the estimation of a large covariance matrix. We introduce
a novel procedure called ChoSelect based on the Cholesky factor of the inverse
covariance. This method uses a dimension reduction strategy by selecting the
pattern of zero of the Cholesky factor. Alternatively, ChoSelect can be
interpreted as a graph estimation procedure for directed Gaussian graphical
models. Our approach is particularly relevant when the variables under study
have a natural ordering (e.g. time series) or more generally when the Cholesky
factor is approximately sparse. ChoSelect achieves non-asymptotic oracle
inequalities with respect to the Kullback-Leibler entropy. Moreover, it
satisfies various adaptive properties from a minimax point of view. We also
introduce and study a two-stage procedure that combines ChoSelect with the
Lasso. This last method enables the practitioner to choose his own trade-off
between statistical efficiency and computational complexity. Moreover, it is
consistent under weaker assumptions than the Lasso. The practical performances
of the different procedures are assessed on numerical examples
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